


A Book of Myths in Which Our Names Do Not Appear

by MaCall (misterpointy)



Series: Shock Value [1]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Anxiety, Causality, Comic Book Science, Comic Book Violence, Depression, Dimension Travel, Disability, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, First Time, Fix-It of Sorts, Heroine's Journey, Implied Sexual Content, Marriage, Multiverse, Not Canon Compliant, POV First Person, POV Original Female Character, Past Tense, Time Travel, Wordcount: Over 200.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-11
Updated: 2016-05-31
Packaged: 2018-05-01 02:54:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 238,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5189435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misterpointy/pseuds/MaCall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What’s made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth.”<br/>—Joseph Campbell, <em>The Hero’s Journey</em></p><p>In which a girl named Mac is swallowed by a wormhole after she graduates from college, becomes a fulgurkinetic metahuman, gets romantically involved with a supervillain, and becomes a legend. In that order.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Departure

**Author's Note:**

> (1) I’mma be honest: this story has no plot beyond the romance and later the rewriting of S1 of _Legends of Tomorrow_. It was a self-indulgent NaNoWriMo project that got much longer than intended. It was supposed to quench my Leonard Snart thirst, but instead I rebooted the whole fic to change what I didn’t like about this because I accidentally got invested in the sprawling AU that I created. Welp.
> 
> (2) Title scrumped from “Diving into the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich. Subheadings are scrumped from the hero’s journey outlined in _The Hero with a Thousand Faces_ (1949) by Joseph Campbell.

**Half the myth is word of mouth.**  
**Nothing has ever been written in a stone**  
**too strong to crumble. Everything changes.**  
**These days we’ve solved mystery with science;**  
**we think we know what the moon’s about.  
**No room for legend and folklore and pretty lying.****

Ashe Vernon, “The Scientific Evolution of a Pantheon of Gods”

* * *

Shock Value  
**Part 1**  
_A Book of Myths in Which Our Names Do Not Appear_  
**Act I**  
The Departure

* * *

**Fulgurkinesis** , _n_.

1\. The ability to create electrical discharges and lightning bolts, control the flow of electrons inside machines, conduct electricity, generate magnetic and electromagnetic fields, and induce paramagnetism in nonmagnetic objects.

2\. Sometimes confused with electrokinesis, which is a scientific branch of electrohydrodynamics (EHD) and is not, in fact, a superpower.

3\. A variant of technopathy.

* * *

**Scene I  
** The Call to Adventure

* * *

Here’s the thing: I wasn’t surprised this happened to me. I’d spent most of my life hanging out in fictional worlds. It wasn’t a shock that I would end up visiting another universe. What shocked me was the reality of it, not the possibility. I’d written self-insert fic before. There was no one like me in the stories I read, so until that changed, why not indulge myself? It was easier to love myself when I thought of myself as heroine material. It was also fun to imagine that the fictional characters I loved might love me back. I wasn’t going to pretend I felt otherwise. I never actually thought I would end up living a self-insert fic, but I wasn’t surprised. Does that make sense?

Anyhow.

It started in a gender-neutral public bathroom. More specifically, the gender-neutral public bathroom in the Margaret M. Casey College of Arts and Sciences building at Seattle University. While my mom—full-time Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and part-time tenured psychology professor—went upstairs to get some things from her office on the third floor, where the Psych Department lived, I had to free the pee. Luckily the first floor bathroom in Casey has one amenity for handicapped people, the metal rail along the wall boxing the toilet in on three sides. I hooked my cane so its handle fit over the smooth corner of the railing and used the metal rail itself to lower myself onto the toilet seat, bunching up my graduation gown around my waist to keep the hem out of the toilet bowl. I did my business, wiped my ladyparts, and shuffled to the sink without my cane to wash my hands. I had just secured the strap of my bag over my shoulder when the portal opened. I had time to grab my cane off the rail, but the portal swallowed my scream the same way it swallowed me, with the people I loved on the other side of the door in the atrium never the wiser.

I flopped to the floor of another public bathroom and groaned out loud because: gross. I used my cane to get back on my feet and flailed into the nearest stall as my pulse thundered in my ears, dry heaving my way through my first panic attack in almost three years.

That’s when the particle accelerator exploded, only I didn’t know what was happening at the time. I huddled in the corner of the stall as the building shook and clutched my bag to my chest, my heartbeat louder than whatever else was going on around me. After the tremors subsided, I scooped my cane off the floor and shuffled into the hallway. That’s when I realized I wasn’t in Casey anymore. All public bathrooms look pretty much the same, especially when you’re busy hyperventilating, but this wasn’t the atrium where I was supposed to wait for my mom to drive me home. It would’ve been a modern-looking hallway, smooth and sleek, except for the veins of fractures caused by the explosion creeping along the walls. I shuffled down the hallway as quickly as I could, watching the floor to avoid pressing on the cracks with my cane. I started running when a portion of the ceiling fell in behind me, my ankle screaming in protest, the arthritic joint aching with every footfall, my bag jumbling against my side as I ran.

That’s when I bumped into a young policewoman, dark skin and dark eyes on top of her uniform, with something tragic lurking in the corners of her pretty mouth. “I’m Officer Jackham!”[1] she put both hands on my shoulders and yelled as an aftershock shuddered through the hallway. “Let’s get you out of here!”

I nodded so fast I discombobulated myself again before she led me out of the building and promised to come back for me before she rushed back in. I didn’t resent her for that. I was disabled, but I wasn’t injured; there were people who needed help more than I did.

That’s when I dug my phone out of my bag to call my mom. If she asked what happened, I’d tell her I went to say goodbye to the people in the disabilities service office and got lost on my way back. Not my best excuse—because Loyola, the building where the disability services office lived, was literally a block from Casey—but it would have to suffice. That’s when my phone informed me it was December eleventh and I was located at the S. T. A. R. Labs facility in Central City, Missouri.

I may or may not have yelled “WHAT THE FUCK?” so loudly another officer came to ask if I was okay. I asked him where I was, he got concerned that I might have a head injury, and I started hyperventilating again. Once my heart stopped pounding, I bullshat—my best friend and I decided “bullshat” is the past tense of bullshitting instead of bullshitted, just because—my way out of there.

Here’s the thing: I was pretty much the worst liar. I fidgeted, I blushed, I stuttered, I couldn’t make eye contact, I admitted I was lying before I even finished telling a lie. I didn’t even bother anymore because why do something you’re the worst at? It was easier to bend the truth into something that worked for me. Anyhow. I told the officer I was from out of town. Not a lie, if I really was in Missouri and my phone wasn’t glitching. I said I’d never been there before, it was my first time going somewhere alone, that I rented a car to drive myself here but it was in the parking garage.

That’s when my luck kicked in, because the officer told me the parking garage was declared a hazardous zone after the explosion and the police force was evacuating the building. Then he gave me cab fare. I used my phone to look up the number and call a cab, which took me to a coffee shop called Jitters because I badly needed a mocha with extra whip.

I learned much later that a dark matter wave produced by the particle accelerator explosion had knocked out all the cell towers and wi-fi in the vicinity, so my phone shouldn’t have worked, except it did. How, exactly? Wait for it.

I huddled at the corner table, still in my graduation gown, dressed for summer underneath because it was June twelfth where I came from. That’s when I took inventory of everything I had with me: $50 cash, the contents of my wallet and my bag, the clothes on my back, a computer with oodles of illegally downloaded media content on it, a smartphone with earbuds attached, a paperback book, approximately two weeks of medication in my days of the week pill case, a travel-sized umbrella, assorted toiletries and cheap jewelry. Not much, but enough to do some damage.

Then, I checked the calendar on my phone and noticed it said the year was 2013. I didn’t yell “WHAT THE FUCK?” again. I buried my face in my hands and ugly cried so hard the barista gave me an almond poppy seed muffin on the house in a futile effort to make me stop.

I was stuck thousands of miles away from home and three years in the past. I couldn’t go back to Seattle. What if I encountered the past version of myself and destroyed the spacetime continuum like in every science fiction movie ever? While my brain scrambled to consider every variable, Jitters went dark. Other customers screamed their cell phones were malfunctioning. Static pulsed in the air. I stopped hyperventilating and gnawed on the inside of my cheek as the lights came back on. I didn’t hear a generator come to life. I assumed one did anyway. I assumed wrong.

(Wait for it.)

I plugged my laptop into the outlet on the wall behind me and opened it to check my email. Which didn’t work. I tried to log into various online accounts and none of them worked; I kept getting error messages saying the accounts didn’t exist. I tried to access my bank account, and that didn’t work either. It was like I didn’t exist here. I googled my name, my parents’ names, my sister’s name, my brothers’ names, my friends’ names—none of them existed, and neither did I.

I made a garbled sobbing noise and banged on my keyboard hard enough to hurt my wrist. That’s when I accessed the internet with my brain for the first time. I could see everything, all the invisible connective tissue cobbling together every piece of information available online all over the world.

I blacked out from sensory overload. I woke up with my face on my keyboard when the barista poked me in the shoulder and whispered _boop_ under her breath. I apologized, thanked her for the mocha, and left a twenty dollar tip on the table before I left.

Later that night, when I checked into a hotel, I told the machine to approve my credit card and it did. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was coming into the powers I got from the particle accelerator explosion. I ordered room service—which was something I never did because it was expensive as fuck—took my meds, and passed out in the bed. I didn’t remember what I dreamed that night, and given how stressed out I was, I was glad about that.

* * *

**Scene II  
** Refusal of the Call

* * *

I spent the next week in a depressive episode. I could feel the electricity humming in the walls. I heard people talking on the phone all over the city. I bit all my fingernails to the quick and blasted music to block them out. I tried calling the numbers in my phone—my mom, my dad, my sister, my younger brother, my best friends—and got the automated voice informing me _the number you have reached is not in service_ every time. SU existed, and the elementary school where my dad worked, even the Nordic tourist trap of a town where I grew up existed, but no one I knew or loved was here in this world.

I had no idea how my phone was still working because my dad paid for our family plan; if he didn’t exist then my service provider should’ve quit providing service. I went on the internet and found the news website for a paper called the _Central City Citizen_ , with one article describing mysterious blackouts at a nearby hospital.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out where I was despite having both seasons of _The Flash_ on my computer. I spent the next week rewatching the entire Arrowverse, comparing events on the show and its spin-offs to my new reality.

I had somehow come to be in Central City on Earth-1 of the Arrowverse during the offscreen events that happened while Barry was comatose. Barry Allen, a.k.a. the Flash, superhero, founding member of the Justice League, scarlet speedster, fastest man alive—was real, and I wasn’t. Ironic.

I had read the comics too. Earth-Prime, or Earth-33, was a world without superheroes besides the ones who existed in the comics. Barry got stranded there once and he had to build a Cosmic Treadmill with one of the DC editors, actually. Earth-33 is the “real” world. Just go with it.

It also took an embarrassingly long time for me to realize that I had superpowers. I thought all the strangeness was me adapting to this reality until I started talking to machines and they talked back, in their way.

That’s when I stopped being depressed and started overthinking in a more productive way. I made a plan. I used my powers to create a false name and flesh out my fake identity. I got to keep my birthday; I couldn’t keep the year I was born and my age, so I kept the latter. I set up a new bank account and watched the balance crawl from zero to millions. I applied for a post office box where the bank could send my debit card, falsified a driver’s license and had a new one sent out too. I gave my new self the bachelor’s degree I earned in my world and the dual master’s degree from the postgraduate MLIS/MMAS program I got into.[2] Trouble was, I couldn’t do anything from the real world because I didn’t have the paperwork to back up the online fabrications. I had no solid evidence of my existence.

That’s when I decided to seek out someone who could give me that. Basil Nurblin, the janitor who dealt weapons on the sly and was—or would be, since I was technically in pre-show time—shot by the once and future Captain Cold, was Colonel Computron in the comics. What a terribad name, am I right? Still, he was a place to start.

* * *

**Scene III  
** Supernatural Aid

* * *

It took me about a month, all told, to set myself up as a real person in the reality of a TV show based on a comic book. I had enough money to buy whatever I wanted, but I had no one to share it with. I was in a perpetual state of shock, numb and dull, not quite able to process what I’d lost or who I’d become. I got lonely, so I got a job working as an archivist in the special collections library at Central City University. I paid off various people to give me stellar references and back up my fake resume. I regret nothing.

I had never made friends as an adult. That didn’t change. I couldn’t get close to anyone, not when I was a metahuman with fulgurkinetic abilities in a city where hundreds of people like me were emergent criminals. Hell, technically I was a criminal too.

I did meet Dinah Lance, née Drake: a medieval history professor with an uncanny resemblance to River Song from _Doctor Who_ , mother of two canaries. I may or may not have squee’d at her, then bullshat something about loving her work. Dr. Lance assumed I meant academically, but I meant as the Golden Age Black Canary in the comics.

I loved my job. I actually liked my coworkers in small doses, so one night I went out with a couple of them to a bar called Saints and Sinners. I couldn’t drink because I was on paroxetine—antianxiety medication that couldn’t mix with alcohol—but I figured I could just order a screwdriver and covertly tell the bartender to please hold the vodka. I fixed the jukebox with my powers when it started glitching and “I Love Rock & Roll” started playing.[3] I kicked off my shoes, left my cane against the wall beside the jukebox, and danced.

Here’s the thing: I was never the kind of girl who danced in public in the reality where I grew up, but no one here really knew me. I wasn’t myself in this reality, so I did stuff that was totally out of character for me. Or maybe I just finally grew out of caring too much about what other people thought.

Anyhow, fingers curled into the flesh of my hips through my skirt and squeezed with a lovely sort of pressure. I may or may not have squeaked in surprise and flailed a little bit. I kept dancing, though, and there was a telltale bulge pressing up against me through layers of fabric when the song ended. I turned to face him slowly, my cheeks flushing hot. I froze when I saw his face. That was a pun, because I was looking up at the once and future Captain Cold, who towered over me by at least a foot. I squirmed awkwardly while his other hand smoothed up the curve of my spine, his thumb moving in little strokes over the material of my dress.

“Let go,” I said, “please.”

It was my _please_ that did it. Len stepped back and held up his hands in mock surrender while he took a measure of me with a look. I tilted my head up and forced myself not to look at the floor. I held his gaze and raised my eyebrows at him instead.

“How did you fix the jukebox, hmm?” he asked in a low voice. It was curious and intimate all at once.

I may or may not have gulped. “That information is on a need to know basis,” I retorted, “and I don’t think you need to know.” I shuffled over to the jukebox and used my cane for balance while I put my shoes back on.

Len followed me and leaned against the jukebox with his arms folded. “Now you have to tell me,” he said.

“There were two records in one slot,” I explained, “and I shook one loose. That’s all.” I didn’t elaborate that I’d done it using electricity like fingers.

“I like your cane,” he smirked at me.

Of course he did. It was bright, electric blue wrapped in black tinsel leftover from my graduation. SU colors were red and black, even though the robes for graduates from the English department were white, so I wrapped my cane in black sparkly wire festooned with glittering stars for graduation. I didn’t have the heart to take it off after I got here, not even after most of the stars were snapped and scattered, but I digress.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You,” he smirked wider, “are so very welcome.”

I blushed harder and flailed the hand I wasn’t using to hold my cane toward the bar. “I came with people from work,” I told him. “I should get back. I don’t want to be rude.”

“Wouldn’t want to do that,” he chuckled and I may or may not have gulped again, but he didn’t try anything else and I went home alone that night.

Unfortunately, meeting a not-so-fictional character in the flesh didn’t make me love him less.

* * *

I didn’t go out drinking with my coworkers again. I learned how to generate electricity instead of merely conducting it. I threw myself into digitizing the special collections archive, which was what I was hired to do and what I wanted to do with my life, until one night Lisa Snart pointed a gun at my head and clicked the safety off. I didn’t know it was her until I turned in my swivel chair to face whoever had me at gunpoint.

That’s when I noticed Len was reaching into the scanner with the Ehoiai inside with his bare hands, his black gloves tucked into his back pocket.[4]

“Don’t!” I blurted without thinking.

Len turned and looked at me instead of doing the opposite of what I said. “Give me one good reason not to,” he deadpanned.

“Because the amino acids on your fingers will corrode the papyrus and make it worthless to whoever hired you to steal it,” I said, “inside the scanner it’s a sterile environment. That’s a delicate text and I don’t think you know how to handle it.”

“But you do.” Lisa smiled at me like a dose of sweet poison. “That’s your job, isn’t it?”

I nodded and gnawed on the inside of my cheek. “How many seconds do you need for this job?” I asked Len.

Len looked at his watch before he answered, “a hundred and twenty more.”

“If you give me thirty of them I’ll give you the _Catalogue of Women_ and make sure you get away with stealing it,” I offered.

“How?” Len asked.

I looked at the scanner, which was twenty seconds away from being finished with the whole battery of analyses done on ancient texts before they’re digitized and entered into the database. I held up one finger. “I’m going to wait until the scan is done and put the fragment in a portable sterile environment for you.” I lifted another finger. “I’m going to turn around in my chair so you can knock me out and I can say I didn’t see whoever stole the fragment when the cops question me,” I uncurled another finger and held up all three as I grabbed my tiny composition notebook and wrote something in it with my other hand. I ripped the page out, then offered it to Len. “That’s my phone number. I want you to call me after you…fence? Is fence the right word?” Len nodded. “Okay, call me after you fence the fragment so I can give the scan I just finished to my boss. That way I get to keep my job and you won’t be cheating your buyer. Everybody wins.”

Lisa watched me seal the fragment into a glass sandwich house and carefully handed it to her brother. I sat in my chair and turned back around, flailing my hand at the back of my head. Lisa clocked me pretty hard and I slumped over my desk. I didn’t see him reach out and touch my hair on impulse or hear Lisa ask what the fuck he was doing. Len told me later that he knew I worked there because he saw me shuffling to work every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday while he was casing the job, but he didn’t know I would be in the library when he pulled the job with his sister because I worked later than usual that night.

I woke up on a stretcher to a paramedic informing me that I had a concussion. I slept in the next day, groggy and a little discombobulated.

Len didn’t call. Instead he showed up at my door. I heard a motorcycle outside and ignored the noise until he knocked. I shuffled over to open it ajar, peering through a sliver of negative space to look at him. “This is stalking,” I told him, “which is creepy and unacceptable.”

“I just want to talk,” he said in a smooth voice.

“Then you could’ve used a phone,” I retorted. “I gave you my number for that exact purpose.”

“Wasn’t sure it was really your number,” he snarked back without heat.

I raised my eyebrows at him. “What do you want?” I asked.

Len put one hand on the doorframe and leaned closer to me. “I want you.”

There was a part of me—the anxiety-ridden eternally insecure part—that couldn’t believe he wanted me even though he said it out loud to my face. I had actual butterflies in my stomach, which was familiar, because I felt like that whenever I watched an episode with him in it. “Why?” I blurted.

“I like you,” he said.

“Yeah,” I scoffed. “You don’t know me well enough to say that and mean it.”

“No,” he said, “but I want to. You’re smart. You kept your cool with a gun to your head.”

I laughed so hard I squeaked and flopped against the doorframe as my front door swung open. Apparently it was contagious because he chuckled at me while I fought to catch my breath again. “I didn’t!” I wheezed. “I was just too worried about the _Catalogue of Women_ to freak out until much later. I know whoever hired you to steal it must’ve put a price on it, but it’s a Hellenistic epic feminist poem, and it’s priceless. I became an archivist to share things like the _Ehoiai_ fragments with the world at large. That’s why I work in special collections. I couldn’t watch you destroy it because you didn’t know how fragile papyrus is. That’s all.”

Len kissed me. I didn’t see it coming because I was shaking off the dregs of hilarity. Len hunched, looming over me in a way that made me feel small in the best sense of the word, his mouth was soft but sure against mine, his palm cupping my face while his other hand remained on the doorframe, our noses bumping together before I opened my lips and he slipped his tongue between them, my glasses fogging up from the heat of his breath. That’s when a literal spark passed between us, not a figural one, drawing a guttural hum from low in his throat.

There was another part of me—the part spawned by having two psychologists for parents—that was aware he was being nice to me because he wanted something from me. I assumed he wasn’t just taking what he wanted because he wanted me to want him back. Also, it was more of a challenge to have me spread my legs for him and beg him to take me. Len was nothing if not a man who enjoyed a challenge. That’s why he loved stealing jewels and hifalutin art. That’s also why he treated stealing and seduction like a game. Trouble was, this wasn’t a game to me. I wasn’t a player like he was.

Later, he explained that he played the dating game casually between jobs, but he never got particularly attached to anyone until me. I had no idea how I felt about that.

I forced myself to step backward and mourned the loss of his palm on my cheek. “I have a concussion,” I told him, “so I can’t finish what you’re trying to start here. Also, sorry if that was terrible. I haven’t kissed anyone in a long time.”

“How long has it been, hmm?” Len asked in the same low voice from before, curiosity and intimacy all in one.

“Almost eight years.” I leaned my weight on my cane and flailed my hand at the open doorway. “Do you still want to talk?”

Len grinned at me, showing his teeth in a bright flash of white as he stepped inside. “Yes.”

That night we talked about ourselves. I was starved for conversation. I figured Len could tell, because he let me babble on and on until I had to get myself a glass of water and gulp it down. I told him about how I went to the Louvre when I was sixteen, before I was disabled, and I spent eight hours there walking through every single exhibit. Len told me about his grandfather, who took him and his sister to the Central City Museum after school when their father was still a cop and not a criminal. I told him about my younger brother, who told me he liked boys when he was ten and told me he liked girls when he was fourteen. I said “I know” the first time and hit the gas instead of the brake the second time because I was surprised. I almost caused a fender bender. Len told me about how Lisa wanted to be a figure skater once, before she became a criminal too—he was so proud of her it made me want to ugly cry a little bit.

Len also cased the room while I babbled, which was another reason he let me carry the conversation. I watched him looking at my books—luckily I kept the classics and poetry and mythology and philosophy out in the open and hoarded the young adult fiction and paranormal romance paperbacks in the bedroom—the owlish things all over the place, the colorful blankets draped over the back of the couch.

I figured he was lonely too. After all, no man was an island entire of itself and whatnot.[5] Hell, even supervillains needed friends. That’s why they ran in packs. Or rogues’ galleries. I knew he wasn’t consciously looking for a friend here, but I also had a hunch that he saw more in me than a potential conquest with a nice ass, because he listened to me at the library instead of shooting me in the face. This was before he made a deal to stop killing with Barry, so me getting a bullet in the brain wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. Len didn’t keep me alive because he loved me; he did it because I gave him a better option than leaving a corpse behind. That’s all. I had a theory about why he sought me out, though. I figured metahumans gave off pheromones Len was particularly susceptible to, which explained why he was attracted to Barry and me.

“Why do you need a cane to walk?” Len eventually asked me.

“I have rheumatoid arthritis in my right wrist and my left ankle,” I explained. “There are normally two hundred and six bones in the human body. I have two hundred even because the seven bones in my wrist joint fused after prolonged inflammation. RA is an autoimmune disease, so I get infusions once a month that suppress my immune system. I’m chronically ill, which means I get sick at the drop of a hat because I’m on immunosuppressants. There’s no cure, but my course of treatment has stopped the progression of the disease, so. That’s something.”

I showed him that my wrist didn’t bend, explained how I’d lost ninety-five percent of the range of motion in my wrist, demonstrated that I couldn’t point my toes or make a fist anymore. I stood up and limped a little, explaining how I compensate for it with my cane and my walk.

“How do you live with that?” Len wanted to know. There was pity in his tone, but he was also impressed, and curious about what my answer would be.

I stroked my thumb over the curve of my right shoulder, where my tattoo was, and shrugged. “I have no idea,” I told him, “but somehow I survive. Also, you’re breaking the mold, you know.”

Len cocked his head curiously. “What mold?”

“There are four typical reactions to my disability,” I explained. “Type 1—the nice ones—people who help out by opening doors or offering to carry things without being patronizing or derogatory. Type 2—the selfish ones—people who use the handicapped stalls in public bathrooms when there are other stalls free, or run to get through automatic doors before me after I push the button when there are three more doors they could’ve used. Type 3—the ableist ones—people who act like being disabled is an unfair advantage or, contrariwise, think you need to suck it up because it can’t possibly be so bad. Type 4—the creepy ones—guys who think it’s sexy if a girl can’t run away. Type 4 dudes are the worst. I’ve only met a few of them, but every time it’s the grossest of the gross.”

“How?” Len wanted to know.

“I went to Washington, DC with my parents a couple of years ago,” I told him, “and we visited a bunch of museums. I went through each one with a brochure and crossed off exhibits to make sure we saw everything. I was also in a wheelchair, because I can’t walk too much without serious repercussions. It was just me and my dad—my mom was at the conference we went to DC for and he was pushing me—and he left me alone at a table when he went to get lunch at the food court. That’s when some dude came up to me and started making small talk, which progressed into aggressive flirting that was super uncomfortable for me, but he abruptly left after he realized I could move my legs.” I saw his expression sharpen, watched his jaw clench. “Yeah,” I said, “the worst, am I right?”

Len didn’t know how to respond to that, so instead of saying anything he took my other hand and caressed my knuckles with his thumb. I wondered if the callous I felt was from holding a gun.

I still couldn’t quite process this whole thing, couldn’t believe it was happening for real. I only knew it was because I was still me. I had traveled to a not-so-fictional universe and manifested fulgurkinetic superpowers, but I still needed a cane to walk. I still overthought everything. I still fell more in love with stories than people.

“Would you mind kissing me again for science?” I asked with a yawn. “I’m testing a theory.”

“Well,” Len deadpanned. “If it’s for science.”

That’s when he kissed me again. I melted for a man whose jam was—or would be—freezing people to death. I was a giant pile of trash.

Len moved his mouth to my ear. “If we’re going to keep doing this,” he whispered, “you should know my name is Leonard Snart.”

Yeah. We hadn’t formally introduced ourselves yet. Just put me in the trashcan where I belonged.

“I’m Mackenzie,” I said. It wasn’t a lie. Mackenzie was my real forename. I didn’t tell him my fake surname. It was Harper-Lowell in the reality where I grew up, because my mom refused to conform to patriarchal expectations and take my dad’s name. Hence the hyphenate I chose to abandon in this reality. “I prefer Mac,” I told him. I was nicknamed Big Mac in junior high because I was a fat girl. That hadn’t changed. I loathed being called Mac for the longest time, but here I decided to reclaim it. “Do you prefer Leonard or Lenny?” I asked softly.

“Len,” he bit my earlobe, “call me Len.”

Later he told me that his grandfather used to call him that, while his father and sister called him Lenny. That explained why he went by Lenny on the show despite Len being his nickname in the comics.

“Len,” I murmured before his lips moved to my neck, “I’m still concussed.” I unclenched my fingers, which had curled to clutch at the fabric of his shirt, and pushed him away. “Don’t push your luck,” I told him.

That’s when his stomach growled, averting what might’ve been an awkward moment. Len chuckled, I chortled, and then I took his hand to drag him into the kitchen. I had a pot of minestrone soup on the stove. I lifted the lid to check on its progress and the delicious smell of the spices I put in the broth wafted up. I grabbed a wooden spoon and scooped out a chunk of potato. I blew a puff of cold air on the chunk before I bit into it, but it was still hotter than a motherfucker.

“What’s this?” Len wanted to know.

“Dinner,” I told him. “If you want.”

Len watched me dump a package of tortellini into the pot and set the oven timer for half an hour. “You cook, hmm?” he deduced after he noticed the colander of undesirable vegetable bits leftover from the fresh ingredients, the expensive knife set on the counter, the assortment of various gadgets I use to make cooking easier on my joints.

“I do.” I shuffled across the kitchen and fetched another bowl out of a cabinet. “I like to cook.”

Len folded his arms while he leaned against the countertop. “Smells good,” he tilted his head at the empty cans of beans on the counter. “Why so many black beans?” he asked.

“I need the protein,” I explained, “and it makes the broth thicker.”

Len smirked at me. “So,” he said, “you like it thick, hmm?”

I was terribad at flirting, so I had no witty response to his innuendo. I flopped into the swivel chair I kept in the kitchen for cooking, adjusted precisely to the height of my counter, and used my feet to scuttle over the black and white checkerboard tiling until I was looking up at him instead. “Do you want a chair?” I asked.

“No.” Len shook his head slowly and started cleaning my kitchen, dumping the contents of my colander into the trash bag under the sink and loading the dishwasher. I blinked in surprise, but didn’t stop him. If he wanted to clean up, that was totally cool with me.

Len told me later that cleaning up was a habit leftover from growing up with his abusive father, who flew off the handle over every little thing when he got drunk. After her mother got the hell out of dodge, Len would do the cleaning and take care of his baby sister in a futile effort to keep their father happy. I did ugly cry when he told me that. Len was better with crying girls than you might expect because he practically raised Lisa. I expected him to clam up, but instead he thanked me for crying over him. That’s when I realized I had fallen in love with Len for real. Yeah.

“Don’t put the knives in the dishwasher,” I told him, “it’ll ruin the blades.”

Len nodded. I scooted my chair over to the sink, washed the knives, and placed them on the drying mat lurking beside the sink on the countertop. We talked a little more while the tortellini cooked, then had dinner together. It was awesome. It was also surreal as fuck, but cognitive dissonance is a natural progression of living in a reality with people you previously assumed were fictional.

* * *

We officially started dating in March—three months after the particle accelerator explosion, seven months prior to Len becoming Captain Cold. I learned how to generate magnetic fields when I wasn’t dating or working. It was awkward being attractive to heavy metal. I kept finding paper clips stuck to my sweaters and random metal objects adhered to me until I learned to control myself.

I kept avoiding sex until the middle of that summer. There was a significant amount of me putting a locked door between us in the literal and figural sense. Len thought I was playing hard to get at first, then confronted me about how wary I was of men after he noticed that.

Here’s the thing: I spent most of my adolescence thinking I was broken somehow. I had only ever been sexually attracted to one nonfictional person, a boy I dated in high school. I’d been in love twice, once with a girl who used to be my best friend, and once with the aforementioned boy. I was demisexual biromantic, which was a thing I didn’t have words for until I was twenty-two. I was twenty-five when I started dating Len. I hadn’t dated anyone since that boy in high school until him. I’d never had sex. Unless you counted that one time I was raped by another boy I dated in high school, which I didn’t.

Yeah. I was a rape survivor. I didn’t report what happened to me for various reasons. I ostensibly wasn’t strong enough to get torn apart in court; I definitely wasn’t strong enough to endure that and a not guilty verdict. I spent a long time working through it—it was a thing, but it wasn’t the most interesting thing about me.

“Did someone hurt you?” Len asked in a low voice with a thread of murderous intent woven through it.

It took me a second to deduce that his tone of hostility wasn’t aimed at me like a weapon. It occurred to me that if I were in the reality where I grew up, I could’ve used him to take out my rapist. Unsettlingly, that sounded like a great idea. After all, my only regret about not reporting what he did to me was that he might’ve done the same thing to other girls since then.

“Yes,” I answered, “but that’s not why I’m not having the sex with you. I’m not casual, Len. I thought maybe I could try being casual, but it’s not working. I’m only sexually attracted to people that I’m emotionally invested in.” Len actually looked hurt by the possibility that I wasn’t emotionally invested in him, so I decided to bite the bullet. “I love you,” I told him. “I’m not having sex with you because I don’t expect you to say it back or reciprocate at all.”

Here’s another thing: Lewis taught Len a lesson that romantic love didn’t exist when he was growing up, that any other kind of love was a weakness, and he had to unlearn those lessons when he met me. It was a process, the unlearning and dying hard of that old habit. It didn’t happen all at once. Len unlearned the habit of pushing Lisa away in the aftermath of his epiphany that love could be a strength. Hence his comment about her wanting them to spend more time together when they attacked the Santini casino to trigger the movement of their cash cache and ended up having a shootout with the superweapons Cisco built for them until Barry showed up.

That’s when I knew he felt the same way, because the look on his face was so full of feelings that it freaked Len the fuck out. After he drove me home, he didn’t come inside like he always had before. I knew it was over. I kissed him goodbye and went inside, still experiencing that cognitive dissonance even after six months in this reality. I closed the door behind me and ugly cried my way into the bathroom. I had to pee after consuming a copious amount of Dr. Pepper, and bowel movements didn’t give a fuck whether you were heartbroken or not.

I didn’t see him again for two months.

* * *

**Scene IV  
** Crossing the First Threshold

* * *

I met Beatriz Bonilla da Costa a week after Len punked out like a loser and threw himself into planning the Kahndaq heist. There were mysterious green conflagrations happening in the city and I started investigating them to keep myself busy on the weekends.[6] I needed friends who weren’t emotionally stunted criminals pretty badly. I could feel electrical impulses, like brainwaves, inside the flames; I wasn’t a telepath, so I couldn’t read whatever thoughts Bea might’ve been thinking while trapped in that state, but I knew they were there.

I handled the whole Bea getting stuck as a goodness gracious great ball of fire situation by electrocuting the flames. I knew that sounded like a terribad idea, but she was about to burn down the main branch of the Central City Public Library! I had no choice, okay? Anyway, the odds were totally in my favor—and not in a disturbing _The Hunger Games_ way!—because the fire went out and she turned back into a person; a skinny Brazilian girl with dark skin and gorgeous hair rendered a shade of green that was almost black. Bea was dead for about a minute until I restarted her heart, but whatever. I saved her. That’s what mattered.

I booped her nose and said, “Hello.”

Bea shrieked indignantly and tried scrambling out of reach. That’s when she noticed she wasn’t dressed. Yeah, metamorphosing into green fire totally burned up your clothes. I had thought of this, so I threw a plastic bag at her that contained an outfit. Bea glared at me over the clothes in the bag and her eyes flared a bright, mercurial green. “These are mine!” she told me like it was brand new information despite the implication that I knew it when I gave her the bag. Bea wasn’t used to talking or thinking coherently after nearly seven months as green fire.

I somehow managed not to laugh at her glowering balefully at me while stark naked in an alley behind a library. “I know,” I told her, “your roommate kept pretty much all your stuff because she didn’t want to bother shipping it back to your mom in Rio. I bought it from her so I could give it back to you if this whole half-baked plan I made to save you worked.”

Beverly Lewis—alias: Fiona Webb—was Bea’s roommate in the apartment complex where the agency they worked for housed their models.[7] Bea came to Central City for college, got discovered after graduation, and stayed here to become a model. That’s when the particle accelerator exploded and obliterated her budding career. Fiona was only too happy to gossip with me. I was a nonthreatening combination of disability and librarian aesthetic. Using a cane tended to make people underestimate me. I wasn’t above taking advantage of that to get what I wanted, but I digress.

Bea stopped glaring and sighed like all of the wind had been knocked out of her, white hot anger replaced by happiness about being human again.

“I think you were trying to eat,” I told her while she was getting dressed, “because you couldn’t exactly consume sustenance the human way as fire, so you burned everything you could to stay alive. I think you picked the library because, well, books are very flammable. Like a buffet,” I grinned more to myself than her, “a buffet of knowledge! Seriously, though, don’t burn the books. Ray Bradbury would be so disappointed in you.[8] Also, you’re basically the human embodiment of Greek fire—”

Bea gave me a judgmental look. “I’m Brazilian,” she told me hotly before she muttered something in Portuguese that was probably rude.

“I know,” I said, “but Greek fire—an incendiary weapon developed by the Byzantine Empire in the seventh century BCE—is green in the Rick Riordan pentalogies about Greco-Roman demigods.”[9] I showed her a picture of her I had snapped on my phone in case she didn’t remember being living flame. “Like you when you’re on fire.”

Bea looked at the picture for a long stretch of silence until my hand got tired and I tucked my phone back in the pocket of my dress. “Do you work here?” she broke the quiet and flailed one hand at the library, “you talk like a librarian.”

“I am a librarian,” I had to try embarrassingly hard not to use Evie Carnahan inflection when I said it, “but I work in the special collections library at CCU. I came for the books and stayed for you.”

“Why?” Bea wondered.

I thought about telling her I was from another dimension. I briefly considered telling her that I was lonely and I wanted to be friends. I generated a wad of electricity in the hand I wasn’t using to hold my cane instead. “I’m not going to say we’re the same,” I said, “because you’re pyrokinetic, so you’re hotter than me in the literal and figural sense of the word, but I felt you like I feel energy in magnetics or weather or machines. I was alone when I got these powers. I spent a couple weeks in a hotel room worried I was going insane because I could feel the electrical grid and hear people talking on their phones and over the radio from miles away. I wanted to save you from doing something like roasting people alive.”

Bea exhaled, her whole body slumping with relief. “I haven’t killed anybody,” she whispered, more to herself than me.

I shook my head slowly. “Nope,” I said, “nobody was harmed in the making of this metahuman.”

Bea laughed so hard a verdant spark came out of her mouth. That’s when I knew I had made a friend, my first as a grown ass woman and a metahuman in one fell swoop.

I took Bea to lunch. We talked over where she wanted to go from there and whether she wanted to be officially resurrected or not. Amanda Waller sent a team of A. R. G. U. S. agents to find her a few days later, but they never got close enough for a snatch and grab.

Len killed them after he stooped to stalking because he lost focus and kept thinking about me while he was supposed to be working. Here’s the thing: stalking was totally not romantic. I didn’t know how I felt about him watching me when I didn’t know he was there. Len kept Bea safe, though. I loved him so much for that.

Waller was ruthless enough to bomb an entire city. Bea might’ve been the long-lost daughter of superspy Ramon Corvalho, but she didn’t know it then; she wanted to be a fashion designer, not a superpowered assassin enslaved by a bomb planted inside her head.[10] I didn’t know how the device Waller used to keep her Suicide Squad in line could work on someone with pyrokinetic superpowers—wouldn’t she melt it when she burst into flames?—but I knew Waller could find a way. I just needed to make sure that didn’t happen.

* * *

I came home from work on the second of October to find Len sitting on my couch, drunk off his ass; he passed out when he tried to get up, so I braved the stench of alcohol oozing from his pores to remove his shoes and cover him with colorful blankets. I put a glass of ice water on the coffee table in his line of sight, then shuffled off into my bedroom to read. I briefly considered writing a note that said _Drink Me_ in homage to _Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland_ , but I was having a bad hand day, so I didn’t.11]

I fell asleep sometime after midnight and woke up again when he crawled into bed with me, his cold fingers splaying over my back since I slept facedown, his breath warm and noxious with echoes of the beer he drank on the nape of my neck. I had never been particularly comfortable with the idea of sleeping with someone in the literal sense of the phrase, but somehow Len didn’t smother me even though he wrapped his body around mine, tangling our legs together and lying with his chest half on top of my back. Luckily he didn’t undress because I was naked except for my underwear. That’s how I slept, because I woke up cocooned if I wore clothes to bed. I laid awake for a long stretch of time while anxiety churned in the back of my skull, because loving someone didn’t fix mental problems. Len nuzzled the knob of my topmost vertebra at one point. I swallowed a scream and tried not to jump out of my skin. I only succeeded because he actually outweighed me. Not by much, but enough to pin me down until the encumbrance of his weight on me evolved from a caged feeling and settled into a calming pressure. I fell back to sleep like that without having a panic attack. That’s love, I guess.

I wiggled out from underneath him when I woke up in the morning and went to cook breakfast, scrambled eggs and pancakes. I would’ve made bacon, except I didn’t have any because I was a vegetarian. Don’t look at me like that. I couldn’t digest the enzymes in processed meat because my stomach was a fickle bitch. If you vomited whenever you tried to eat meat, you’d totally be a vegetarian too. Fight me.

Len entered the kitchen slowly, his dragging footsteps not unlike those of a shambling zombie, and sank down into my swivel chair with a groan; he folded his arms on the island and laid his forehead against his forearm.

“I’m not giving you any hair of the dog,” I told him, “more alcohol is the last thing you need.” Len peeked over his forearm to glare at me. I smiled without baring my slightly crooked teeth and pushed a plate of eggs in front of him. “Eat,” I ordered before I shuffled back to the griddle and flipped the pancakes.

“I love you too,” Len told me hoarsely.

“I know,” I retorted. “I’m awesome.”

Len chuckled, winced at the noise emerging from his own throat, and started eating his breakfast. “Mac,” he murmured after I sat down to eat my pancakes, “I meant what I said. I can live without you,” he took a long drink of water, “but I don’t want to.”

I stopped chewing to make an incredulous noise. “That’s why you chickened out for months?” I asked. “Because you wanted to see if you could live without me? Of course you could! I don’t want a relationship where the other person feels like he can’t leave when he needs to!” I was suddenly a seething wad of anger because he left me alone without a word instead of talking it through with me first. “That’s not how being in love works,” I snapped, “you can’t make unilateral decisions that affect both people who are in a relationship without having a conversation with the other person first. If you needed space, you should’ve told me. I would’ve given you whatever you needed, including space to deal with your crap. That’s what you do when you love someone.”

Len grinned at me. “Say it again,” he told me.

“Say what?” I yawned into my sleeve, ruining my deadpan snarky comeback.

Len grinned wider and stole a forkful of pancakes from my plate. “That we’re in a relationship.”

“Yeah,” I huffed, “we’re in a relationship.”

Len used his feet to scoot the swivel chair over and kissed me softly. I figured more pressure would’ve exacerbated his aching head.

“I’m a difficult person to love,” I warned him. “I’m a moody bastard with a disability and you’re a criminal with stunted emotions. This won’t be easy.”

“Good,” Len said vehemently before he kissed me again.

I thought he was too hungover to notice I made the pancakes on a griddle that wasn’t plugged in. I thought wrong.

* * *

Barry came out of his coma a few days after Len told me that he loved me for the first time. Len was plotting to steal the Kahndaq dynasty diamond from Central City Museum, his crew of thugs reassembled while he was getting his shit together. Whenever he went to the _Motorcar_ and eavesdropped on the C. C. P. D. radio frequencies, he always remembered to bring home fries. What a good.

I could feel Barry running all over the city because he generated electricity in the process. I wanted to reach out with my brain and touch him, just a boop. I thought about how alone he felt knowing impossible things existed with no one to believe with him, to believe in him. I knew he would find those people soon enough and that I wasn’t one of them. Eobard Thawne was, and that was another reason for me to stay far, far away. Farooq Gibran was another fulgurkinetic whose powers were unstable compared to mine, so I figured that anything he could do, I could do better.[12] Eobard kept his corpse on hand in a futile attempt to harvest and repurpose whatever aspect of his powers allowed him to disempower Barry. I wasn’t here to be used for parts, thank you very much.

I also thought about talking to Gideon, who got lonely in the secret lair Eobard stuck xyr in, but decided not to risk it. After all, I could wait to have a conversation with xyr until Eobard had ceased to exist. Gideon was probably nonbinary because, despite having a feminine voice, xe was an artificial intelligence construct, hence the gender-neutral pronouns.

I felt Clyde Mardon brewing a thunderstorm at the bank he robbed, felt the indoor lightning crackle while it whispered to me in soft wordless language like a caress of static electricity inside my brain. I jolted and flailed in my chair at work. I didn’t feel it when Clyde summoned fog later to escape from the C. C. P. D. because there was nothing electric or magnetic in that. I did feel Barry run to Starling City later that night, my range stretching over those six hundred miles, and knew Felicity was listening to his conversation with Oliver.

I overheard Barry communicating with Cisco and Caitlin over the radio frequency tuned into the lightning bolts on his ears about unraveling the twister Clyde made and felt the lightning that struck him when he tried.

I heard Eobard tell him to run.

* * *

I woke up to Barry screaming “Cisco! There’s fire everywhere!” over the link one morning and zapped the reading lap on my bedside table into oblivion. I texted Bea in case she accidentally set another fire. Bea responded with a side-eye emoji. I texted back a shruggie: ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯. I also had to install a Japanese language extension on my phone with my technopathic powers because the face in a shruggie is actually the katakana character _tsu_. Worth it.

Barry was going to start experiencing hypoglycemia soon. I knew that feel—if I didn’t eat something every few hours, nobody would be happy ever again. Barry had a superfast hypermetabolism, so not only should he have experienced low blood sugar, but he also would’ve had to consume ridiculously large portions of food to avoid losing a significant amount of weight; his hair should’ve grown superfast too, so although he didn’t look capable of growing facial hair, he should’ve had to give himself a haircut every morning.

Anyhow.

There were camera feeds all over S. T. A. R. Labs, in the C. C. P. D., hidden at the cheap apartment where Barry lived and festooned around the house where he grew up with Iris. Eobard set them up after he assumed Harrison Wells’ identity, but he had no idea I was accessing them on a semiregular basis. I would probably be dead if he did—or I would’ve tested my theory on whether or not I could fulgurkinetically disempower speed force conduits if he tried to kill me.

I overheard Eobard say that, “Some people, when they break, can’t be put together again.” I wondered if he meant Rose, the woman he loved in the comics whose life he destroyed.[13]

Barry retorted that, “Some people heal even stronger.”

I liked to think what he said applied to me.

* * *

I still wasn’t having sex with Len. There was a part of me that worried he would stop wanting me after he got obsessed with Barry. There was another part of me that was reluctant to consummate my relationship with him because I still didn’t think of myself as part of his world. I thought I didn’t belong with Len, even though I was head over heels in love with him.

Here’s the thing: love wasn’t enough. That’s not what made me choose to stay here. This wasn’t a love story—it was a story that had love in it. Does that make sense?

Len didn’t push his luck, which was weird. On the bright side, I was glad he respected me enough to let me decide when I was ready to have sex with him. On the darker side, his lack of seduction made me feel insecure as fuck. With anxiety, you couldn’t win.

I was also lying to him about two pretty significant parts of who I was: being from another dimension and possessing fulgurkinetic abilities. Theoretically, I was capable of disempowering the Flash and Len was going to want him dead in a few weeks. I trusted Len not to hurt me; I didn’t trust him not to use me against Barry, whom he was going to see as his nemesis after he acquired the cold gun.

(Wait for it.)

I went to see a revival showing of _Blue Devil II: Hell to Pay_ with Len around the same time Barry and Iris West saw a zombie movie. Daniel Cassidy existed in this universe. How cool was that?[14] Len couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen the original _Blue Devil_ , even though it came out four years before my alias was born, so we rented that and watched it the night before we saw the sequel. That’s when I learned he was born in the seventies, which meant he was sixteen years older than me, and he was biracial even though he could pass for white.

I was mostly unperturbed by our age gap because I had three older siblings: my sister Stephanie was twenty-two years older than me, my brother Phil was twenty-six years older, and my brother Mike was twenty-eight years older. Technically my older siblings were my half-siblings, but since my sister and my younger brother and I were adopted, we never made the distinction between half and full siblings a thing. Len understood that because he and Lisa apparently had different mothers. Lisa was two years older than me and fourteen years younger than her brother. Len thought of Lisa as his in the same way I thought of my siblings as mine; we were all or nothing when it came to the people we love. That’s something we had in common. I’ll admit I was a little bit perturbed, though. After all, there were threads of gray in his black hair and I still got carded at the movies because people thought I was younger than seventeen.

Len must’ve noticed I was overthinking again because he stopped and kissed me, cupping my face in his palms to control the angle of the kiss and keep my glasses from getting in the way. I wrapped my arms tight around him and clutched at the fabric of his jacket over his shoulders while I kissed him back. I felt the hard length of him through the many layers of material between our bodies. I felt his cock twitch. I lost control in the heat of the moment and generated static in the friction of his mouth on mine, the metal in his watch and belt and shoes fluxing when an electric current flowed through me and generated a magnetic field like I was a solenoid. All that kept me grounded were the rubber soles of my boots, immune to conductivity. I moaned into his mouth and felt a penny from the ground below us stick to the swollen knob of my arthritic left ankle through my sock and shoe, the copper temporarily made paramagnetic merely by its proximity to me.

What if I electrocuted him during sex? What if I stopped his heart in his chest?

I unclenched and demagnetized; the penny slid off my boot and clinked onto the pavement. “There’s something you should know,” I whispered.

“Let me guess,” Len said hoarsely, “it has something to do with how you made pancakes without plugging the griddle in. Or how that box of tiny screws you spilled mysteriously stuck to your whole body. Or how I feel sparks when I kiss you.” I must’ve looked stricken, because his expression softened. “I pay attention,” he told me. “I pay attention to you.”

“I’m fulgurkinetic,” I told him, “which basically means I control electricity, and magnetism, and technology. That’s how I fixed the jukebox the night we met. I was at S. T. A. R. Labs when the particle accelerator exploded. Ironically, a particle accelerator works by using electromagnetic fields to propel charged particles at high speeds and contain them in defined streams of particle beams, but when it exploded it released those charged particles all over the city and they caused mutagenesis in people like me.”

Len didn’t bother to finish high school, but he understood my explanation without struggling. If you wanted to know how many variants of intelligence there were, counting the number of people in the world could’ve told you exactly how many.

There was a reason every metahuman who emerged in the aftermath of the explosion got a different superpower. If the particle accelerator made us more of who we are, then manifesting abilities unique to each person affected is significant. There’s a reason Len didn’t get cryokinetic abilities even though he got hit by the dark matter wave too.

“This changes things,” Len said.

I swallowed thickly and looked down at the sidewalk. “I know.”

Len touched my hair, which had frizzed with static electricity in the confines of the giant clip I kept it twisted up into. “I love you,” he told me. “This doesn’t change how I feel. Nothing will change that, Mac. I’ve never been in love before. Now that I am…” he shrugged, “it’s going to take more than fulgurkinesis to scare me off.”

I buried my face in my hands, my fingertips shoving my glasses up above my eyebrows, and ugly cried so hard my eyes ached. Len took me off the street and back to the car once people started giving us concerned looks.

Kyle Nimbus turned into poisonous gas to murder a restaurant full of mobsters a few blocks away.

* * *

Joe told Barry, “For every person you save there’s going to be somebody you can’t, and the hardest thing you’re going to have to face is not some monster out there with powers, it’s going to be that feeling of uselessness when you can’t do anything, or the guilt that weighs on you when you make a mistake. Some things you can’t fight. Some things you just have to live with.”

I knew he wasn’t talking about me, but what he said got me thinking about the parallels between disability and superpowers. It wasn’t what happens to you. It was what you chose to do with yourself in the aftermath. It’s the choices you made to live your life a certain way. Barry chose heroism. Len chose villainy, or theft. I avoided making a choice like a boss.

(Wait for it.)

* * *

I multitasked the same way Barry did to learn the limits of my powers. I knew my range was basically wherever there was technology. I can intercept, amplify, broadcast and receive signals from cellular networks, wi-fi, radio frequencies and satellites as far as geostationary orbit. I can keep every device in my kitchen going at once if I sit perfectly still and generate both electromagnetic and straight up magnetic fields over the acre of land I owned; the more I stretched out, the weaker the field was.

I could hear Len saying “a hundred and eighty-two seconds, gentlemen” over the link he used to communicate with his crew while he made his first attempt to steal the Kahndaq dynasty diamond and failed epically. I heard the guard in the passenger seat of the armored car radio for help and felt the ping as the alert system Cisco set up piggybacked onto their distress signal.

Felicity was meeting Iris for the first time, which made no sense. Iris was supposedly with Barry around the clock when he was comatose and Felicity visited him after the particle accelerator explosion, but they never met until this onscreen moment? I call shenanigans. Iris also used the word _computer-er_ to describe what Felicity did for a living. I couldn’t even.

Actually, the most egregious continuity error on _The Flash_ to me was a discontinuity between the pilot and episode two where Iris said her dissertation was on her laptop, which implied that she was working on her doctorate, but in the second episode she was taking what sounded like an undergrad journalism elective. I liked the idea of Iris having a doctorate in journalism because it made way more sense for her character than starting a blog on a whim and getting a reporting job at C. C. P. N. out of nowhere. Fight me.

Anyhow.

Len knew I existed when he saw a red blur on the traffic camera footage that day, so the existence of another metahuman didn’t come as a shock to him. I knew he was going to kill three people that day: a thug in his crew for wanting out, Basil Nurblin who stole the cold gun from S. T. A. R. Labs, and a man whose only crime was being in the wrong theatre at the wrong time.

Here’s the thing: I thought of killing as a useful skill, a necessary evil, because some bad guys needed killing and sometimes it took a bad guy to get the job done. Len hurt people; it was a thing he admitted to with no remorse. (“I’m a criminal, and a liar, and I hurt people, and I rob them.”) Loving him didn’t make him less capable of coldblooded murder. I knew who he was before I got involved with him. I had no regrets.

Len wanted me to go with him on the museum walking tour and casing adventure, but I had to work and I was having a bad ankle day, so I declined. I knew he was going to make a running getaway, which was totally not a thing a crippled girl could do, not even a crippled girl who also happened to be a fulgurkinetic metahuman. Len jumped over a moving taxi in the middle of the street! If I had tried a similar maneuver, I would’ve gotten stuck halfway across the hood and flailed there awkwardly until the cops arrived, with or without the intervention of paramagnetism. Len was a smooth criminal; I was the antithesis of that.

I felt it when Felicity hacked into the city network and Cisco pinged the cold gun from the car on the way home. I felt the train derail after I got home from work. I reached out, magnetizing the metal and making the falling train cars touch down slowly, just enough to keep all of the passengers alive. I made sure that nobody died before I remotely disconnected the signal in the cryoengine from the S. T. A. R. Labs monitoring system. I also reprogrammed it to update itself without pinging and keep the fuel unexploded. Luckily the metal demagnetized without anyone noticing my hand in the situation, metaphysically speaking.

I fell asleep that night totally exhausted. I couldn’t walk the next day, so I called in sick to work and conked out again. Len woke me up later by pulling back the blankets and slipping his cold fingers along my spine.

I yelped, which made him laugh. “Rude,” I whined and yanked the blankets over my head.

“Why aren’t you at the university, hmm?” Len asked.

I put my glasses back on. “I’m having a really bad leg day,” I told him with a yawn. Len set the Kahndaq dynasty diamond on the pillow that wasn’t supporting my head. I rolled over to look at the gemstone and booped it with one finger while he unstrapped the holster on his thigh and put it on my bedside table.

Len sat beside me on my bed, the mattress compressing under his weight. I smelled nicotine on his clothes, probably from cigarettes Mick had smoked at the motel in Keystone City where they met after he derailed the train. Len didn’t smoke around me, if he did at all. I was immunocompromised, and carcinogens weren’t particularly good for people with autoimmune diseases—or anyone else, for that matter. “Sorry,” he said before he took my hand and started idly playing with my fingers.

“Take off your clothes,” I blurted. Len gave me a look I can only describe as _filthy_ , but in the best way. I gulped and untangled my hand awkwardly from his. “I can smell the smoke,” I told him, “and that smell is sticky. I just changed my sheets last night. No secondhand carcinogens allowed in my immunocompromised space.”

Len stood and tugged his shirt over his head in that way boys do, with their arms crossed and their fingers curled over the hems. I gulped again when he held my gaze and unbuttoned his pants. Len crawled into bed with me once his pants were on the floor, wearing only his socks and underwear. I had my panties on under the covers and nothing else. Len didn’t taste like cigarettes when he kissed me. I probably had morning breath, but he didn’t seem to care because his tongue was busy licking into my mouth. I took his hand in mine and brought his palm to cup my breast. I didn’t know how else to give him permission with my lips and tongue preoccupied. Len groaned in the back of his throat and curled his fingers into my flesh hard enough to leave a mark, the rough pad of his thumb flicking over the hard nub of my nipple. I moaned into his mouth and he broke the kiss to press our foreheads together.

“Mac,” he said my name in that low voice and I shivered under him, “I want to go down on you until you can’t walk for reasons that have nothing to do with your bad leg day.”

I couldn’t tell him no. I was only human, okay? Yeah, metahumans were still human. Technically. “Yes,” I said, “please.”

Len nipped at the swells of my breasts, then lifted them so he could lick and suck on both of my nipples at once. I fisted my hands in my sheets as my hips lurched forward without my permission. Len peeled back the blankets and took his time kissing his way down my torso, nuzzling my belly and mapping the grooves of my stretch marks with his tongue. I may or may not have ugly cried a little bit. I had always thought my flabby stomach would be something for a man to gloss over during sexytimes, not focus on. I thought wrong. Len sucked bruises into the insides of my thighs and over my hips, the sensation of his stubble against my skin enough to make me moan. “Let’s see how wet you are,” he said, and then he experimentally stroked one fingertip over the crotch of my underwear. I whimpered as my hips lurched forward without my permission again. Len chuckled, delighted, and finally took my panties off, his fingers greedily stroking the coarse damp curls between my legs before he spread me open. “Such a pretty cunt,” he murmured fervently. “Let’s see what you taste like.”

I knew how I tasted. It was a salty flavor—savory, maybe—not sweet, but not bad. I figured it got that way from me constantly eating sunflower seeds in a doomed attempt to avoid biting my fingernails. Yeah.

Len took it slow at first, licking my folds in drags and sucking on them. I knew he was avoiding my clit on purpose. I made a frustrated noise and he chuckled again, the sound buzzing through me along the length of my spine, my back arching while my head flopped back against my pillow and my hands clutched desperately at my sheets. Len stopped using his mouth to work one long finger into me and watched my body adapt to being stirred up while he figured out where my g-spot was. I figured my sharp, loud whine gave it away. Len crooked his finger and my hips bucked so hard the mattress creaked. “Say my name,” he told me.

“Len...” I whimpered in protest after he slipped his finger out, then squirmed as he filled me up again with two fingers, grinding them inside me. “I never knew where my g-spot was because my fingers aren’t long enough to reach it, but yours are,” I propped myself up on my elbows to meet his eyes and whispered, “you’re the only person to ever touch me there.”

“Good.” Len grinned before he slowly flicked the flat of his tongue over my clit.

I wanted to get annoyed at the double standard implied by that—because I obviously wasn’t the only person he’d eaten out, or fucked silly, for that matter—but I was distracted by his tongue fluttering inside me. I flopped back against my pillow and said his name again, the word becoming a litany when he gently tugged my clit between his teeth and sucked it. I came harder than I ever had by myself, one clitoral orgasm blurring into a twofer and blending into whatever he was doing that involved his fingers and my g-spot, my toes curling while my arthritic hand ached from my attempts to make a fist.

That’s when Mick Rory broke in through my front door and kicked my bedroom door all the way open. Len wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and sucked my slick from his fingers while he drew the cold gun with his other hand. I giggled. I couldn’t help it! There he was in his socks and underwear with his cock so hard it must’ve hurt, pointing a superweapon at his only friend. “Mick,” Len snarled, “get out.”

Mick leered at me. I yanked the blankets up to my chin and crossed my legs automatically even though he couldn’t see me anymore. I generated a wad of lightning in my hand and let its veins slither over my knuckles. Mick quit looking at me like he wanted to see me naked up close. That was progress. “What the fuck is she?” he asked Len even though I was sitting right in front of him.

“I’m a fulgurkinetic metahuman,” I told him. Mick didn’t know the word because he wasn’t a giant nerd who hailed from another dimension, so I explained my powers to him as simply as possible. If you couldn’t explain something accessibly, you probably didn’t know what you were talking about as well as you thought you did. That’s what separated good teachers and infomaniacs like me from pseudo-intellectual snobs. “Now do what Len said and get out,” I told him.

Mick snorted, but he did what I said and left me alone with Len.

“Sorry,” Len heaved a sigh, “he must’ve followed me from the motel.”

I was struggling to keep my eyes on his face. “Yeah,” I huffed, “but this doesn’t have to end in cockblocking.”

Len tilted his head curiously as he looked down at me. “What?”

“Shut the door,” I told him before I slipped out of the bed and limped to get a clean pair of panties from my dresser. I wasn’t comfortable without underwear. I had no idea why. I just wasn’t.

Len closed and locked my bedroom door while I sat on the bed and put the panties on. “What now?” he wanted to know.

“I want to suck your dick,” I told him. “I haven’t given a blowjob in years. I never wanted to until now.”

Len closed the distance between us so he was standing at the foot of my bed with me looking up at him. “Say that again, hmm?”

I felt suddenly awkward. I hate not having specifics. “What?” I asked.

“Say that you want my cock in your mouth,” Len told me.

I reached out to put my hand on him through his underwear. I felt him twitch under my palm. That was an odd confidence booster. “I want your cock in my mouth,” I said. “I want it badly.”

Len must’ve liked the correct grammar thing, because he grabbed my hair and tangled his fingers in the frizzy tendrils at the nape of my neck. I almost took my glasses off, but he stopped me. “Leave them on,” he said. “Let them fog up while you suck me off. I’d like to see that.”

“This isn’t a sexy librarian thing, is it?” I asked.

Len grinned at me. “No,” he said, “but later you should tell me I have overdue books and I can only pay my fees by—”

I held up my other hand to stop him. “Len,” I raised my eyebrows at him, “you would just steal the books from the library instead of checking them out, don’t lie.”

“I don’t lie to you,” Len told me. “I won’t start now that you finally let me fuck you. That would be counterintuitive.”

“Good to know where your priorities are,” I retorted.

Len groaned softly when I yanked his underwear down and wrapped my hand around his cock. There was precome leaking from the slit on the head of him. I flicked my tongue over the head of his cock and tasted it, the smell of him strange and heady now that I was close enough to breathe him in. I sucked the head of him into my mouth, curling my tongue over it and swirling back and forth. Len clutched at my hair before I took all of him into my mouth and down my throat until my nose brushed his dark pubic hair. I hollowed my cheeks out while I sucked on him, moving my tongue sideways along the underside of his cock and curling it around as much of his girth as I could, my exhales indeed fogging up my glasses.

“ _Yes_.” Len clenched his jaw and hissed. “You look good with my cock in your pretty mouth,” he told me in a low voice made rough by what I was doing with my tongue. “You’d look even better with me buried deep inside your hot, tight little cunt.”

There was a part of me that was aware Mick could probably hear everything he said, which in turn meant he knew exactly what I was doing to Len, but I didn’t care. I was done pretending I didn’t want him, that I didn’t ache for more of him inside me even while his cock was down my throat. I wasn’t ashamed of this messy awkward thing. I was proud when his fist clenched in my hair, proud of every raw sound I dragged from his lips and every clench of his jaw.

Len warned me before he came. There was so much and it didn’t go all at once. I couldn’t swallow it all. I didn’t gag or choke, though. I looked up at him while I licked up what didn’t go down my throat. Len knelt to kiss me hard and skimmed his tongue over the seam of my lips where the taste of him lingered.

“No offense,” I told him, “but I’m going to get dressed and brush my teeth now. Mick can hang out as long as he doesn’t have a cold or the flu or an equally contagious virus, but he can’t sleep here. I’m the plutonium demon core and I don’t trust him not to engage in a tickling the dragon’s tail debacle.”

“No one is going to tickle your dragon’s tail except me,” Len deadpanned.

“I wasn’t making a sex metaphor,” I retorted. “I was referencing nuclear bombs that killed people with radiation poisoning in the forties. I won’t go nuclear, but I can electrocute Mick to death. Let’s not make that mess. I don’t feel like disposing of a body today.”

Len chuckled and kissed my forehead before he pulled his pants back on and left the room.

I winced my way into my bathroom to brush my teeth and take a shower. I didn’t have the energy to stand up, so I sat on the floor of my bathtub and made a mental note to procure a shower chair instead.

Mick was drinking a beer on my couch with his sock feet on my coffee table when I emerged from my bedroom fully dressed with my wet hair up. At least he took his shoes off like a polite guest was supposed to do. I still gave him a low-key zap until he put his sock feet on the floor where they belonged.

* * *

I met Caitlin Snow a few days after Hallowe’en because her earrings were attracted to me and I didn’t notice they had gotten caught in my cardigan until it was too late to avoid her.

“I’m so sorry,” Caitlin gave me a tiny smile, “they must’ve fallen out.”

That’s when she reached out and touched my sweater to get her earrings back and the static discharge knocked her down.

I winced. “I guess the apology is all mine,” I said before demagnetizing her earrings and holding them out to her like an offering.

Caitlin looked over her shoulders to see if anyone was paying attention to us and found no one. “You’re a metahuman!” she whispered triumphantly.

“What?” I wasn’t supposed to know the word, so I pretended I didn’t.

“You have powers,” Caitlin hissed conspiratorially. “You seem to be capable of generating static electricity and magnetic fields, inducing paramagnetism in nonmagnetic metal and possibly other substances—”

“I call it fulgurkinesis,” I interrupted her.

Caitlin giggled, probably because she knew the word “fulgur” meant “a flash of lightning.” It originated from the Latin verb “fulgeō,” which literally meant “to flash.” I was genre-savvy and chock-full of irony, okay?

“I have a blood collection kit in my purse,” Caitlin told me. “Would you mind giving me a sample?”

“If you want one,” I said, “you can wait until my blood gets drawn next month like my doctors have to.”

“Why do you have multiple doctors running blood tests every month?” Caitlin wanted to know. That’s when she noticed my cane and paled. “Did the particle accelerator explosion cripple you?” she whispered. “Did we make you sick?”

I shook my head. “I’ve had rheumatoid arthritis for eight years,” I explained gently, “my disability has nothing to do with my powers. Except my cane is made of a magnetic alloy so it’s been permanently magnetized for months, but otherwise not so much.”

Caitlin giggled again, but it faded into a blank expression too soon. “I can’t force you to let me run tests on you without your consent,” she told me, “but something could be going on inside your body that might negatively impact your health.” With that, she dug a card from her handbag and held it out to me.[15] “Would you please call if you change your mind?”

I kept the card and duct taped it here:

 _Dr. Caitlin Snow, MD_  
_S. T. A. R. Labs Bioengineering Department_  
_(816) 555-7609_

I didn’t call, but I had a sample of my blood sent to S. T. A. R. Labs after my next blood draw along with a note asking Caitlin not to let anyone know I existed because I was scared the government might kidnap me like the plot of every bad sci-fi movie ever. I didn’t have to access the camera feeds to know I made her laugh.

Barry said Bette Sans Souci was the only metahuman not hellbent on destroying the city the next day. Caitlin quietly disagreed.

* * *

I caught a strain of influenza so bad it rendered me bedridden for two and a half weeks, two days shy of topping the worst illness I’ve ever had, which lasted nineteen days. I sensed Farooq attacking S. T. A. R. Labs, but all I could do was vomit copiously.

Len held my hair while I threw up, kept me hydrated, gave me liquid Tylenol—and laughed when I yelled “Shots! Shots! Shots!” before I drank it—and reheated the soup I had made for me even though I was too ill to be hungry for most of those sick days.[16] I fell in love with him all over again because he’d never really dealt with my chronic illness in this capacity until then and he did so well.

Bea came over to check on me on the eleventh day of my illness, and my pyrokinetic lady friend took me dating a supervillain pretty well; she threatened to roast Len alive if he punked out again, but then she left without setting him on fire. That was progress, because I was heartbroken in the beginning of our friendship and Bea had promised to make him suffer for me, like girls did.

I winced after I overheard Cisco shout “Supersonic punch, baby!” and whoop so loudly it set my teeth on edge. I also overheard Eobard talking about Tess with Joe and groggily wondered if he meant Rose from the comics again.

I felt it when Farooq attacked S. T. A. R. Labs, but my fever hit 103°F that day. I sang “Hot Blooded” off-key to Len instead of trying to help Barry recharge, which had been my plan for that episode before I got sick again.[17] Luckily show canon went on without me and the cosmic treadmill knockoff Cisco had built did its thing.

Len caught my cold after I got well and he was a hilarious sick person: he was clingy as fuck, he only wanted to eat chicken soup with noodles shaped like stars and drink orange juice with no pulp, and he marathoned all five seasons of _Leverage_ from my couch and told me that we should found a company like theirs with me as the hacker, Mick as the hitter, Lisa as the grifter, and Len himself as both thief and mastermind. I told him that I would start Golden Snowball Recoveries—his company from the comics which advertised that he and Lisa found lost or stolen items or your money back—with him if we could share the position of mastermind. Len said we could use whatever position I wanted totally deadpan before he blew a copious amount of green phlegm into a tissue. Not sexy, but a little bit adorable. Not that I would ever say that to his face.

Lisa showed up with the brand of soup he liked. That’s how we officially met. Lisa didn’t like me at first. I tried not to take it personally. Lisa didn’t like anyone but Len and Cisco on the show. I doubted she liked herself.

Too bad Lisa didn’t need to like me to pose a question to me. “What on earth does my brother see in you?” she asked me casually, with an underlying threat.

“I have no idea,” I told her. “I’m awkward, fat, crippled, and terrible at people; I’m also smart, funny, good at food, and great at books. I doubt Len sees in me what I see in myself. That’s why people need other people, because we’re not meant to be alone with ourselves. That’s what family and lovers and friends are here for, to let us be every single facet of who we are. That’s how I see it, anyway.”

Lisa didn’t have a comeback for that. I gave her a bowl of chicken soup with noodles shaped like stars and let her take the bowl to her brother. I used a vein of electricity to load the kitchenware on the counter into the dishwasher. I didn’t notice Lisa standing in the archway that led into my kitchen until she dropped an empty glass on the floor.

“Well,” I deadpanned. “This is awkward.”

“What the hell are you?” Lisa spluttered.

I used the vein of electricity to write “fulgurkinetic” in fancy cursive while I explained myself to her. “That’s not what Len sees in me,” I said, “he only found out last month and we’ve been seeing each other for almost eight months now.”

Lisa tilted her head and looked at me in a way that was eerily similar to her brother. “Does that mean you could crack any security system, including the network that controls traffic camera footage?”

“Probably?” I didn’t like the implications of that question.

“Len is planning a job with Mick,” Lisa told me.

I yawned and plopped my elbows on the countertop. “I know,” I said.

Lisa continued to speak as if I had never spoken. “I’m their contingency plan,” she explained, “and I guess that makes you mine.”

“Have you ever flown before?” I wondered.

“What?” Lisa narrowed her eyes at me in suspicion. “Why?”

“Because we’re getting the hell out of dodge in the aftermath of that job,” I explained, “and we’re going to lie very low in another city for a few months because the Santini family consigliere told Len and Mick to leave town.”

Lisa flipped her dark curls over her shoulder. “Where are we going?” she wanted to know.

“Seattle,” I told her.

“Cool.” Lisa gave me a tiny smile, just a slight curve of her lips without malice lurking in the corners of her mouth. That was progress.

* * *

Len turned forty-two—the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything—on December eleventh. Apparently the particle accelerator exploded on his forty-first birthday. I hadn’t known when Captain Cold’s birthday was in the comics on Earth-33. I wondered if the showrunners had done it on purpose. I doubted it.

Lisa was the one he celebrated his birthday with every year. I was invited, but I didn’t want to pull a job, so I declined. I made him a mint chocolate chip ice cream cake instead and left it in my fridge.

Here’s the thing: I hated mint chocolate chip. Anything mint flavored reminded me of the dentist. Contrariwise, toothpaste and fluoride that didn’t taste like mint was gross, so that’s what I used whenever I brushed my teeth or got them cleaned. I had a friend who bought fennel toothpaste once. Yeah. That was apparently a thing. Ugh.

Len smiled at me when I showed him the cake, a slow unfurling at the corners of his mouth, too subtle to show his teeth. “You hate mint chocolate chip,” he murmured.

I smiled back. “You don’t. It’s your favorite,” I flailed my hand at the cake. “Happy birthday. I’m tone-deaf, so I don’t sing.”

Len kissed me before he ate his cake so I wouldn’t taste it, which I appreciated. “Thank you,” he told me softly after he broke the kiss. “I love you so much.”

I nuzzled his nose with mine. “I love you more,” I told him.

Len stole another kiss and gently tugged my bottom lip between his teeth before he pulled away. “We’ll see about that,” he said.

“Not more than you love me,” I clarified, “more than your questionable taste in favorite ice cream flavors.”

Len chuckled around a mouthful of cake and took my hand in his. I squeezed his fingers and tried not to blush when he licked his lips instead of using a napkin like a normal person.

Why wasn’t I having sex with him, again?

(Wait for it.)

* * *

I hated Christmas.

Not like Grinch levels of hatred where I wanted to ruin the holiday for everyone down in Whoville, but a simmering reticence for social interaction and my mom using “It’s Christmas!” as a prime excuse to push me into doing things I never had the energy for.[18 It was suffocating. I got anxiety just thinking about the holiday. It was selfish and terrible, but my favorite part of Christmas was going to Barnes & Noble on December twenty-sixth with a couple hundred dollars in gift cards burning a hole in my wallet. I knew I was an ungrateful bitch. I was lucky to have a huge family that loved me and each other enough to spend the holiday together. I was lucky that my parents had money for presents. I was lucky to have a mother who spent all year shopping for my younger brother and me. I was lucky my sister lived nearby and spent Christmas morning with us.

I missed them all, okay? I missed Christmas Eve dinner with my aunt who always made us play board games after the meal ended. I missed the quiche my dad made for brunch on Christmas morning. I missed the stocking my grandmother sewed by hand for me with the red velvet back and delicate needlepoint roses on the front. I missed getting fuzzy socks in my stocking. I missed being forced to pose for terrible pictures while opening my gifts. I missed the collection of Santa figurines my mom festooned over the fireplace mantle. I missed the stuffed army of snowmen guarding the bookshelves along the wall in the great room.

I still totally hated Christmas, though.

Len didn’t hate Christmas because he and Lisa spent it with their grandfather, and he asked me to spend Christmas with his family because he assumed my family had died tragically and I never bothered to correct him. That’s how I met Lester Snart, a sweet old man who drove an ice cream truck once upon a time and somehow didn’t know his entire family was full of criminals.[19] Which made a sickening kind of sense when I realized his short term memory was shot—he remembered his grandchildren, but he probably wouldn’t remember meeting me. It was an early sign of dementia.

I left the room after a while because I couldn’t handle it without remembering my grandmother; not the one who made the stocking for me, but the one who tried to teach me piano and crochet and failed epically through no fault of her own. I had no musical talent whatsoever and I kept trying to pick makeshift swordfights with my brother using the crocheting hooks instead of making a hat like she wanted. Yeah.

I was eighteen when her dementia progressed so far that she forgot who I was. I was twenty-one when she died, but it had been so long since she’d been herself that her death was sheer relief. I flashed back to what she looked like confined to her bed with an IV drip to hydrate her and feeding tubes giving her nutrients, with a colostomy bag hanging from under the sheets, how sick it was that she couldn’t do basic things for herself anymore.

It was all too much. I gnawed off nine of my fingernails before I got up and walked out with the little half-moons stuffed in the pocket of my dress. I zoned out while my anxiety swirled around inside my head. Len probably said my name more than once before he touched my shoulder, but if he did, I didn’t hear it.

I jolted and generated a magnetic field strong enough to push him away. “Sorry,” I neutralized the field and stood without my cane to shuffle into his personal space, “did I hurt you?”

Len shook his head slowly and smoothed his hands from my shoulders over my back to my waist, pulling me into his arms until he was supporting my weight instead of my cane. “What’s wrong, hmm?” he asked softly.

“It started the same way,” I whispered, “with my grandmother. At first it was small things, like where she left her keys, stuff that seemed ordinary. Then she forgot who I was, who my siblings and cousins were. Then she forgot my mother and my aunts, her daughters. Then she forgot how to speak, how to walk. Then she forgot herself until she became this shell of a person stuck in bed with a colostomy bag and feeding tubes everywhere. Then she died and I was glad. At least she wouldn’t have to exist that way anymore. I panicked every time my mom forgot something, even though she’s always been scatterbrained, because what if that was a warning sign?” I paused to exhale a tattered breath. “Sorry,” I said again, “meeting your grandfather triggered some memories. I’m okay now, I think.” That’s when I noticed he was smiling down at me. “What?” I asked.

“Well,” Len smiled wider, “you’ve never let me see you get scared before.”

I wasn’t scared of dementia as much as I was scared of getting so horribly sick I lost myself. I couldn’t hold utensils for almost a year after my arthritis started affecting my wrist. I had to relearn how to hold a spoon, a fork, a knife. I refused to let my parents feed me. I was nineteen; I hated feeling like a helpless child. That was terrifying enough, but I was at risk for pretty much any contagious disease spread through sharing air or space with other people. Also, lymphoma. “If you like seeing me scared,” I deadpanned, “you should know that’s creepy as fuck. I can’t decide if it’s creepier than stalking or not, though.”

“I don’t like seeing you scared,” Len told me. “I do like knowing you’re comfortable enough to let me see you get scared.”

I stood on tiptoe and kissed his throat. I couldn’t reach his mouth when he stood up straight because he was a whole foot taller than me without shoes. “I love you,” I whispered. “Sorry my anxiety got louder today.”

Len cupped my face and kissed my forehead, then my lips, his mouth lingering soft and sure on mine; he only broke the kiss after I made a sharp little noise in the back of my throat. I’ll admit that it may or may not have been a sex noise. Totally inappropriate. Len watched me shuffle off to fetch my cane after I untangled myself from him. “I love you too,” he told me, “my grandfather might not remember today, but I promise I’ll never forget it.”

Lester charmed an overworked nurse into taking pictures of us with an old instant camera. There’s one polaroid framed in his room. There’s another permanently magnetized on the fridge in my kitchen with _family_ written underneath the photograph in Len’s handwriting, with a loopy _l_ and a smoothly hooked end on the _y_.

I still totally hated Christmas, but I didn’t loathe that one entirely.

* * *

**Scene V  
** Belly of the Whale

* * *

Between catching a cold and a serious case of the holiday blues, I didn’t have sex with Len until the second week of January. That’s when I returned from the special collections library to find white rose petals leading into my bedroom. “I am not cleaning those up,” I told him.

Len folded his arms. “I don’t normally do this, you know.”

“I appreciate the romantic gesture,” I said. “I’m still not cleaning those up. I can’t squat without repercussions, dude. I’m crippled and whatnot. Now tell me why there are rose petals on the floor.”

“I gave up my lease,” Len said. “I haven’t slept at my place in months, not since we bought that bed together. I want to move in with you. This is my home,” he took my cane and propped it against the wall before he pulled me into his arms. “You’re my home, Mac.”

That’s when I knew I couldn’t go back. I had changed too much. This was my home now. This was my city. I knew its heart, the arteries and vessels of its streets, and I knew its brain, the electrical impulses of its network threading invisibly through its graying matter. I knew it better than I knew the hometown where I grew up or the city where I went to college. I knew myself better here in this place than I ever had anywhere else.

“Yes,” I said. “You should move in. You should also be naked.”

Len grinned while he unbuttoned my dress. “You first.”

I let the dress fall to puddle on the floor and put my hands on his upper arms for balance when I stepped out from the circle of stiff fabric. I was glad my bra matched the panties I had on that day—whenever they did, I felt like I had my shit together even when I didn’t.

Len made a low appreciative noise and dragged his gaze up and down my body. “Undo your hair,” he told me.

I took the clip out like he said and sparks were generated when I let my hair loose. Len reached out to cup my face and curled his fingers into the hair at the nape of my neck while he kissed me; the kiss escalated until he ended up sitting on the edge of the bed with me straddling him in my stockings and underthings. I broke the kiss and tugged on his shirt. Len pulled it over his head and tossed it onto the floor before he unclasped my bra with his teeth.

“Okay,” I said. “That was awesome. You’re lucky I’m wearing the only front closure bra I own. That wouldn’t have worked otherwise.” Len raised his eyebrows to nonverbally claim he could totally unhook a back closure bra with his teeth as well. I rolled my eyes. “I’m not putting on another bra to win this argument,” I told him.

“Good.” Len palmed my breasts and swirled his thumbs over my nipples. I could get embarrassingly wet from having my nipples teased. Len figured that out when I squirmed in his lap and moaned out loud at the sensation of his mouth on my breasts. I smoothed my hands from his shoulders down his chest, following a line of dark coarse hair until I found the waistband of his pants. I undid the buttons and slipped my hand inside to lightly stroke the head of him with my fingertips. Len groaned into the hollow of my throat and spun, throwing me back on the bed so hard I bounced a little bit. “Not yet,” he growled. “I plan on teasing you until your pretty cunt is soaking wet and you’re begging for me inside of you.”

“This isn’t because I made you wait ten months, is it?” I asked.

“No.” Len shook his head. “It’s because I think you like to be teased. I saw how wet you got before. I can smell how wet you are now,” he cupped my face and forced me to look him in the eyes. “Tell me I’m wrong and we’ll do this another way.”

Len was a criminal and a killer who decided to become a supervillain after he acquired a superweapon, but he treated me better than any of my exes did. I wished I was better at this. I wished I had more experience, more fuckups to draw on, because this was something I didn’t want to ruin by, well, being myself. I sniffled, but managed not to cry. “How are you a better man than every boy I’ve dated?” I wondered.

“Well,” Len smirked and stopped touching my face, “they were boys.” With that, he took off my panties and spread my legs wide open. I felt my cheeks flush hot as he looked at me, his fingers dark against my pale thighs. I was intimately aware of the lights above us and that leaving them on meant he could see it all. Every freckle and slub of scar tissue. Every stretch mark. Every blue vein bright under my sallow flesh. Every visible imperfection. Everything. Len must’ve noticed I was screaming internally because he quit devouring me with his eyes to focus on my face again. “You’re not ugly,” he said. “You’re real. Look at me.”

I propped myself up on my elbows and became vaguely aware of the subtle difference between the blue and grey of his irises when our eyes met. Len held my gaze as he put my thighs on his shoulders and nuzzled the mound of my cunt. I whimpered and my hips pitched up beneath the hand he’d splayed over my belly. Len grinned and flicked his tongue along the length of my slit, his varicolored eyes still on mine. “You have complete heterochromia iridium,” I whispered, “is that hereditary or what?”

Luckily he was used to my weird information fetish by then. “I got it from my mom,” Len told me.

“That’s good,” I said, “so it’s congenital heterochromia, which is an inherited autosomal dominant trait, not symptomatic of injury or disease—”

“Mac,” Len blew a puff of cool air over my slick heated flesh and I squirmed, “stop talking.”

That’s when he buried his face between my legs. I shut up and blushed harder when my hips jerked against his face because he took it gladly. Len kept teasing me until I came apart twice, until I felt boneless and my whole body was shuddering from how intense my orgasms were.

“Did you know blowing into a vagina can inflate the uterus and trigger air embolisms?” I told him after he crawled up my body and settled on top of me.

Len burst out laughing and buried his face in the space between my neck and shoulder. “You make the worst pillow talk,” he retorted hoarsely. “Don’t ever change.”

I booped his clavicle with two fingers. “I want to be on top,” I said, “please.”

“Sure.” Len flopped onto his back and splayed his fingers over my belly like he didn’t want to stop touching me even for a little bit. I moved to straddle him again, inhaling sharply when the head of his cock brushed my swollen clit. It was my hand and my hips working his cock inside me. It was my choice to take him, to give myself to him. This was mine. This is what being a rape survivor meant for me.

Len smoothed his palms over my back while I adapted to the sensation of him inside me and stroked the words tattooed along the curve of my right shoulder with his thumb. I moved up and down on him slowly at first, then faster once I got used to feeling stretched and started aching for more friction. Len tangled his fingers in my hair and kissed me hard as he thrust up into me. I shifted my hips and gasped into his mouth when his cock slipped over my g-spot at that angle. I fucked him that way until I came again, my orgasm booming through me harsh and bright like a thunderclap.

“Mac,” Len growled, “I want…I _need_ …”

“Okay.” I nodded my consent to whatever he meant by that and wrapped my arms tight around his neck, letting myself get totally lost.

* * *

I wondered if Len chose to steal _Fire & Ice _from Osgood and Rachel Rathaway because they’re homophobes who disowned their son after he came out to them as gay. It made sense to me because Len was played by an openly gay actor. If the show thought I should feel sorry for a couple who shunned their gay disabled son, they had another think coming. Hartley Rathaway was a jerk, but he clearly followed his parents’ example. Hartley also totally had chronic pain in his ears, which was a disability. Fight me.

I made a mental note to apologize profusely to Caitlin because Len abducted her and left her alone with Mick long enough for him to tie her up and threaten her in a vaguely sexual way. That’s why I didn’t warn either of them about the whole crossing their streams thing.

I watched Len call Barry out on live television and laughed at how much of a melodramatic loser my boyfriend was. Of course I knew how this would end, but it was cool seeing it for real.

Lisa picked me up in the morning even though we were so not morning people. I fell asleep in the backseat and woke up when she braked hard enough to give me head trauma. Lisa did bring me a venti decaf mocha with extra whipped cream, though. That was progress. I put my bag in the trunk and stashed the fresh clothes Len asked for in the backset. I only took a carryon when I flew because my parents had lost so much luggage in their many travels, including that one time we went to Dublin when their clothes got left at the drycleaner because they didn’t get there before it closed and we flew out to Paris at three in the morning, hours before it opened again.

I was the only person who had enough clothes to avoid wearing souvenir t-shirts every day because I passed on the drycleaner. I also had to share a room with both of my parents and my younger brother in every country we visited. I slept in a chair when there weren’t enough beds to go around. That was what happened when one took a European vacation on frequent flyer mileage. Although my only regret was not eating all the things in Paris. Don’t judge me.

Lisa swerved in front of the prison transport vehicle and we only avoided a perpendicular collision because I asked the armored car to stop. I changed the transport route in the system and doctored the traffic camera footage to cover our trail; once the cops figured out what happened, we’d be thousands of feet above the earth.

I had a giggle fit at the sight of Len in a prison jumpsuit when he opened the backdoor. “Sorry,” I wheezed, “orange is just not your color.”

Len shrugged and cocked his head in concession. “That’s true,” he said before he changed his clothes in the middle of the road and slipped into the backseat with me. I let him tuck me under his arm. That’s when he cupped my face and bent to kiss me. I curled my fingers into the fabric of his shirt and kissed him back.

Lisa gagged when she looked at us in the rearview mirror. “That’s my brother,” she griped and made a disgusted noise that crawled up from her guts to the back of her throat.

I nipped at his collarbone just to make her squirm. Len grinned and kissed my forehead.

Mick buckled himself into the passenger seat in his arsonist’s coat on top of a threadbare henley and a faded pair of jeans tucked into heavy work boots. Lisa broke approximately a dozen traffic laws on the way to the airport. I got us past airport security in a flash and we boarded the plane with nobody the wiser.

I slept on the plane. I could fall asleep pretty much anywhere. I woke up when we landed and yelped at the impact. Len chuckled and took my hand in his while the plane ground to a halt on the tarmac. Lisa was on his other side in the aisle seat and looked murderous about that. Oh well. It wasn’t my fault she never specified a preference for where she wanted to sit. Mick was across the aisle from her, snoring loudly with his mouth open and drool on his chin.

There was a house that was empty for years in the reality where I grew up. It was a million dollars in overpriced waterfront property. It sold during my senior year of undergrad. I bought the version of that house in this world. It was close to the house I grew up in, which also existed in this reality. I could see it across the cold surface of Liberty Bay, the scudding clouds overhead scalloped in streaks of gray, their darkening edges promising rainfall.

Bea was flying out to meet us here in a few days. I couldn’t leave her in the city unprotected. We had a huge fight over Len shooting the A. R. G. U. S. agents Waller sent to abduct her, but ultimately she decided she would rather be free and damn the consequences. I hoped Waller didn’t get to her in the span of those few days. I didn’t want Bea to go through what her counterpart from the comics did with Checkmate and whatnot. I told her to text me every fifteen minutes. Bea thought I was joking. I totally wasn’t.

Missouri was two hours ahead of Washington, so it was still early in the morning when our motley crew arrived at my house. I still couldn’t believe I owned more than one house. That’s another reason I decided to stay in this world. I was capable of being independent here. I wasn’t in the reality where I grew up. I was lucky to have parents with the money to support me. I didn’t have to pay tuition because I went to the university where my mom worked. I didn’t have to work because my parents supported me long after they should’ve had to despite all the mistakes I made along the way. There were oodles of disabled people who weren’t so privileged, but I hated being dependent on them. I clawed my way up into the university without using my mom to get in. I did well enough to be on my way to grad school. I was finally going to live on my own without depending on my parents for everything. I was going to build my future out of the experience. That’s why I got depressed after I ended up here. I thought my future was over before it ever began. I thought wrong.

Len found me on the front porch staring across the water and ugly crying a little bit while Lisa unpacked and Mick raided the kitchen that someone from a local concierge service had fully stocked a day before I also had them leave a rental car in the garage and hide the keys somewhere only I knew.

“You’re my home too,” I told him quietly, “no matter where I am. You’re where my heart is.”

Len wrapped his arms tight around my shoulders and buried his face in the crook of my neck while he held me from behind. I kept one hand on the wooden porch rail for balance and pressed my other palm against the back of his hand. “It’s cold here,” he whispered conspiratorially. I could hear the grin in his voice. “It suits me.”[20]

I giggled. “You’re Captain Cold,” I deadpanned, “no one is surprised by that.”

“Why is there no meat in this house?” Mick roared like impotent wind, all bluster and no real catastrophe.

“I’m a vegetarian,” I told him.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Mick shouted back as he stomped into the open doorway.

“I can’t process red or white meat,” I retorted. “If you threw up every time you tried eating meat, you would become a vegetarian too. There are approximately three grocery stores and fifteen restaurants within five miles of here. If you want meat so bad, then go out and get some.”

“Take my sister with you,” Len said in the smooth voice he uses to make winning speeches, “so I can get some.”

I had another giggle fit in his arms until he kissed my neck, because my knees buckled when he gently scraped his teeth over my pulse. “Rude,” I huffed, “is sex all you ever think about?”

Len heaved a sigh, a weird amalgamated exhale of contentment and regret. “You’re not ready for what I’m thinking.”

I’ll admit that my brain went somewhere kinky pretty fast. I assumed he meant biting me harder, or bondage, or something else I hadn’t thought of that I wouldn’t mind trying because I trusted him. “Now you have to tell me,” I said.

Len quit holding me to fold his arms. I turned to face him with my eyebrows raised and my expression pointed. “I want to marry you,” he said.

Later, he explained that he proposed because Lisa and I had become accessories after the fact to whatever crimes he and Mick had been going to jail for when we broke them out of prison transport. I couldn’t be forced to testify against him in a court of law once we were married. Len thought ahead and made plans for us, not only because he saw an opportunity to turn things to our advantage, but also because he didn’t want to let me get away. That was what being in love looked like for someone like him. I hadn’t thought about marriage at all, though. Len knew me well enough to deduce that, hence his reluctance to tell me what he was thinking until I was ready to hear it.

I screamed internally. “What…” I stretched the short _a_ sound out into awkward territory.

Len heaved another sigh. “I knew you weren’t ready.”

“We’ve only been together for ten months!” I flailed my hands and gesticulated until my arthritic wrist started to ache. “We were on a break for two of those!”

“This is what I want,” Len said with slow vehemence, his voice soft and sure. “I’m willing to wait until you’re ready, but I’m telling you my intentions now. That way,” his fingers curled into his sleeves and I realized he was trying not to touch me, “when I give you a ring it won’t be coming out of nowhere.”

I couldn’t believe I had to get sucked into another dimension to find someone who wanted to marry me. “This is the worst proposal ever,” I retorted.

Len smirked at me. “Not proposing,” he took a step toward me. “Not yet.”

That’s when I realized he’d said _when I give you a ring_. Not _if_ , but _when_. That meant he’d stashed a ring somewhere. I wondered if he’d brought it with him because he intended to propose to me in my hometown.

“Mac.” Len put both hands on the porch rail behind me and hunched so his nose almost touched mine. “Look at me.”

I did what he wanted and looked up into his eyes until I noticed he still wasn’t touching me at all. That was probably on purpose. I scooped my arms underneath his elbows and hugged him as hard as I could, turning my head against his chest to keep my glasses from digging into my face. Len wrapped his arms tight around my shoulders again with a sigh, tension slowly fleeing from his body.

That’s when Lisa came looking for the keys to the rental car in the garage. I told her where I hid them in exchange for a promise that she would pick up a plain cheese pizza from Central Market for me. “It’s my favorite pizza in the world,” I told her in a reverent voice I reserved for delicious food.

Lisa smiled and reached out with one hand to pap my face. I gaped in shock at her display of affection. Lisa grinned and in that moment it was more obvious than usual that she and Len are siblings. “Do you want anything?” she asked him. “Mac got the beer you like, but I doubt she wants to share her favorite pizza with you.”

“No way,” I warned him. “That pizza is all mine. I will fight you.”

Len gave my cane a pointed look. I guess he temporarily forgot that fulgurkinesis renders my disability irrelevant in a fight. “I’m armed,” he told me.

“I know,” I retorted. I could feel the metal from the blade of a knife concealed in his boot and a gun at the small of his back. I stroked the fabric of his sweater and sparks flew out from my fingertips before I said, “so am I.” After all, paramagnetism beats guns and knives every time.

Len gave me the look I could only describe as filthy, in the best way. I figured a colloquial term would be eyefucking. I still wasn’t quite used to being looked at that way. I liked it, though.

I magnetically attracted the keys from the mouth of the crow statue on the roof and demagnetized them before I handed them to Lisa. “I should’ve rented two cars,” I sighed, “or motorcycles for everyone who isn’t klutzy as hell, which is everyone here except me.”

Len chuckled—probably because he knew I regularly tripped on thin air—then gestured at the open doorway. “After you,” he said. I got my cane and shuffled inside the house. Len closed the door behind us and took a step toward me. I stepped back and he chuckled again, his laughter moving through his belly. “I know you can’t run away,” he told me, “but I still had to chase you.”

“I wasn’t…” I huffed, frustrated. I had known he loved the thrill of the chase, but I didn’t make him wait because of that. “I wasn’t trying to make you chase me. It wasn’t about you at all.”

“I know.” Len cocked his head as his eyes flattened, all of the heat in them extinguished. “We’re here now. Where your rapist is.”

I shook my head slowly. “Not here,” I hedged. “Not exactly.”

Len took another step toward me. “Tell me his name.”

I bristled at the implicit order in his tone and shook my head again. “I get to choose,” I told him, “like I chose you. I deserve to decide whether or not he dies.”

“Mac,” Len said in his smoothest voice, “you said you wanted him dead before. I can give that to you.”

This, in hindsight, would’ve been the opportune moment to explain where I hailed from, because even if my rapist existed here, Len wouldn’t be killing the person who actually hurt me. I propped my cane against the couch instead, then pulled my dress over my head and dropped it on the floor. “I’m done talking about this,” I told him. “I love you. I wanted you to see this place because it’s all I’ve got left to show you since my family is gone. I want to have sex with you before your sister and your partner in crime finish questing for lunch, and then I want to show you what my favorite things were about this place when I lived here. I don’t want to think about my runner up worst thing ever.”

Len took another step toward me and closed the distance between us, cupping my face in his cold hands. I shivered and scooped my fingers underneath his shirt to feel the warm flesh of his stomach. “What’s your worst, hmm?” he asked softly.

“Not being able to draw anymore,” I said, “especially now that I’m with you. I know it’s weird to call a dude pretty, but you are. I would totally draw you like one of my French girls if I could hold a pencil without seriously painful repercussions.”

Len found an old composition notebook of mine once with pages of sketches inside, so he knew I could draw before my rheumatoid arthritis became a thing. I wasn’t the greatest artist, but I wasn’t bad either. “I love you too,” he told me. “Let me show you.”

That’s when he took his hands off my face and lifted me up as if I weighed nothing at all. I did not weigh nothing at all, so I found that ridiculously hot. I clutched his shoulders automatically while his fingers dug into my bare thighs. It was me who kissed him first then, me who licked into his mouth, me who shifted my hips to grind against the hard length of his cock through his pants and my panties. Len broke the kiss to put me gently on the freshly made bed in the ground floor bedroom and pulled his shirt over his head.

There was a master bedroom upstairs, but stairs and I were mortal enemies, so Lisa was sleeping up there and Bea was going to occupy the smaller upstairs bedroom. Mick was downstairs with us. I refused to put him and Bea on the same level of the house. That was a conflagration waiting to happen.

Len gave me a speculative look after his pants were on the floor and said, “I want you on your knees.”

I did what he wanted and he unhooked my back closure bra with his teeth. It took him longer than my front closure bra had, but he still got the job done. “Really?” I looked over my shoulder at him. “Really, dude?”

Len grinned and slipped his fingers between my legs, his grin spreading into delighted smugness when he felt how damp my panties were. I buried my face in the crook of my elbow, whimpering as his fingers teased me through silky fabric and my breasts—still in the cups of my bra—squished against the floral print flannel duvet. I blushed when my hips bucked; he hadn’t even touched me without my underwear in the way and I was embarrassingly soaked. Len stroked his thumb over the scar tissue at the small of my back and leaned over me to whisper in my ear. “How did you get this?” he asked.

I made a high noise in my throat because I could feel his breath heavy and heated on the nape of my neck. “I stood up in the bathtub when I was nine and the faucet did not approve. I have another scar on my elbow from spinning around in a parking lot and colliding with a handicapped parking sign. Ironically,” I moaned when his fingers roughly brushed over my clit, “that happened before I was handicapped.”

Len had scars all over his torso from the years when he was abused by his father; his scars told horror stories, but mine were mostly funny stories. That’s why he liked hearing about them. Everyone had fleshy anecdotes, bodily tragedies, storytelling that went skin deep. Len nuzzled my shoulder and yanked my panties down before he fucked me with his fingers, working me open until I was dripping all over his hand, his thumb rubbing my clit in sloppy circles until I came so hard I moaned out loud. I whimpered again when I felt him slip his cock along my slit. “Mac,” Len curled his fingers into the flesh of my hip to hold me where he wanted me while his cock rubbed between my wet folds, “I want you to ask me for it.”

I squirmed when the head of his cock brushed my swollen clit. “Len,” I gasped his name and peeked over my shoulder to look him in the eyes while I said, “please take me from behind and fuck me hard. I could tell you were holding back last time. I want you to be as rough as you want, so please—”

That’s when he thrust all the way into me, deep enough to bump my cervix. Len moaned at how good it felt to bury himself inside me and feel the aftershocks of the orgasm he gave me flashing around him. I snapped my hips up and back to meet his thrusts. Len wrapped his arms tight around my waist and pulled me upward so I was kneeling with my back against his chest. “You’re so _cute_ ,” he murmured in my ear while he cupped my breasts, his thumbs flicking my nipples until I writhed all over his cock. Len sounded like he resented my cuteness a little bit, like I had meant to undo him with it, like it was a weakness. I didn’t know how to feel about that. “Say my name,” he growled as one of his hands smoothed down between my legs again.

“Len,” I gasped as his other hand tilted my face up. “Len, please—”

“Yes,” Len hissed before he kissed me thoroughly enough that my toes curled while he moved within me. I came on his cock a second time while he was rubbing my g-spot with his thrusts, and then I came again from his fingers on my clit. Len fucked me through it before he came inside me. I figured my knees gave out somewhere between orgasms because I ended up lying flat on the duvet with him on top of me, both of us totally fucked out. Len nuzzled the curve of my shoulder where my tattoo was and stroked my hair out of my face to look me in the eyes.

I smiled at him. “Hi,” I said breathlessly.

Len smiled back. “Hi there,” he said in a low voice.

I nuzzled his nose with mine. “I’m glad we did it that way,” I told him. “I was facedown when I was raped. I started masturbating on my knees because I wanted to replace those memories with good ones, but doing it with someone I love is even better.”

Len kissed me softly. “I told you my dad hit me and my sister,” he said after he broke the kiss, “but what I didn’t tell you was that I didn’t let anyone touch me for years afterward except my grandfather and Lisa. I paid for sex at first because I didn’t want to get involved with anyone, then I started having more casual relationships until I met you. I’ve never been serious about someone before. I want to be with you for the rest of my life.”

“It might be the rest of _my_ life,” I warned him. “I’m immunocompromised and you’re somehow in perfect shape despite the drinking and whatnot. It’s very possible that you’ll outlive me.”

“Don’t want to,” Len retorted before he stole another kiss and made it last until Mick returned with grocery bags chock-full of meat. I could hear stiletto heels stomping up the steps behind him.

“Mac,” Lisa huffed when she noticed my dress had puddled on the floor between our bedroom and my couch, “quit fucking my brother and come get your boring pizza.”

I flailed off the bed and went to flush the remnants of his semen down the toilet while Len uncovered the duvet. I got dressed and shuffled into the kitchen after I did my buisness and washed my hands. I realized Lisa must’ve gotten the pizza last to keep it warm for me. “Thank you,” I said reverently.

“Whatever.” Lisa rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. That was progress.

Len emerged from our bedroom fully dressed. “Hey, Sis.”

“Hey, Lenny.” Lisa smiled wider at her brother. I couldn’t blame her. Len loved Lisa the most, and the feeling was mutual. That didn’t bother me. I felt the same way about my sister, after all.

Mick was in the kitchen doing something with the meat he got—later I saw a cookie sheet festooned with hamburger patties chilling in the fridge—so he didn’t get a smile or another form of greeting. Lisa had ordered a pizza for herself and I saw why she called mine boring. It was loaded baked potato pizza: olives, cheese, onions, chives, baked potato, and bacon bits. I folded myself into a chair, grabbed a slice of my own plain cheese pizza, and munched happily. Mick emerged from the kitchen with a double meat sandwich—thinly sliced turkey and roast beef—and gave a BLT sandwich to Len without having been asked to make one for him. There was a strange fluctuating deference between them. Mick did what Len wanted, until he didn’t. It occurred to me that we had something in common. I also wondered if my headcanon about his switch tendencies—from dominant to submissive—was acceptable, but I couldn’t prove my theory over pizza and lunchmeat.

I ate half my pizza. I guess having sex made me hungry for other things.

“There’s a shitload of boxes in the garage,” Mick told no one in particular.

“Oh!” I yelled, but it came out muffled because my mouth was full of pizza. I finished my fourth slice and shuffled into the garage. Between my anxiety disorder and my chronic illness, I did a lot of my shopping online. I had shipped everything I’d ordered in the past few months to my second home. I loved getting things in the mail. It was mostly clothes and preordered books contained in the boxes. There was a dress I had really been looking forward to. I washed my hands to make sure I didn’t get pizza residue on the fabric before I tried the dress on. It fit, which was awesome, because half the time clothes I bought online didn’t fit me. I was seeing how my new dress looked with stockings underneath when the bathroom door opened.

Lisa raised her eyebrows and gave me a long stare. I squirmed under her scrutiny until she smirked and said, “Damn.”

“What?” I asked.

“You look hot,” Lisa told me. I waited for her to add something like, “for a fat girl.” Instead she took the clip out of my hair.

“Ow,” I protested and held up my hands to stop her when she tried situating the frizzy tendrils of my hair around my shoulders. There was a reason my mom called me Medusa, and it was because my hair looked like snakes when it was loose. “I don’t like it when people touch my hair,” I told her.

Lisa folded her arms, her head tilting in another gesture eerily similar to her brother. “Why not?” she asked.

“Because when I was little it was down to my waist, so the girls I went to preschool with kept playing with it without my permission, and when I asked them to stop one tried to cut it off while I was napping,” I explained reluctantly. “I had to get a pixie cut because the scissors went halfway through my braid.” I got bullied pretty badly until I started fighting back in junior high. It took me an embarrassingly long time to do that.

“That sucks,” Lisa said without much sympathy. I didn’t blame her. I’d seen the scar on her clavicle from the bottle her father used to beat her on the show and when she told me how she had gotten it. Lisa also knew I had lost more than my hair when I was younger. “I thought you were too young for my brother until I realized he’s more immature than you in a lot of ways,” she told me while she curled my hair. “Lenny practically raised me, but that meant he didn’t get to have things just for himself while I was growing up. Don’t get me wrong,” her fingernails dug into my neck and I couldn’t tell whether it was on purpose or not, “he’s a jerk of a brother, but he’s the only jerk brother I’ve got. If you break his heart, no one will ever find your body.”

I didn’t bother to remind her that I could stop her heart in her chest. “‘Our kiss is a secret handshake, a password. We love like spies, like bruised prize fighters, like children building treehouses. Our love is serious business. One look from you and my spine reincarnates as kite string. When I hesitate to hold your hand, it is because to know is to be responsible for knowing. There is no clean way to enter the machinery of the heart. Just jagged cutthroat questions. Just the glitter and blood production,’” I inhaled sharply and continued after my exhale, “‘the truth is this: my love for you is the only empire I will ever build. When it falls, as all empires do, my career in empire building will be over. I will retreat to an island. I will dabble in the vacation-hut industry. I will skulk about the private libraries and public parks. I will fold the clean clothes. I will wash the dishes. I will never again dream of having the whole world.’ That’s a poem,” I told her. “‘This Is the Nonsense of Love’ by Mindy Nettifee.[21] That’s how I feel about your brother. I won’t feel this way forever, but I hope the love I have will grow into something better, like how a seed becomes a tree. If a tree can live for centuries, I hope my love will last until my body is ashes, because despite my seedling metaphor, the idea of being put in the ground freaks me out, even though I wouldn’t technically be alive to know whether my corpse was burned or buried.”

“‘Just the glitter and blood production,’” Lisa smiled at me in the mirror. “I like that.”

“I have both of her poetry anthologies somewhere if you want to read them,” I told her. I was a librarian, okay? That was my jam.

Lisa hummed noncommittally and kept meticulously curling my hair. I let her put red lipstick on me in the aftermath. Shockingly, despite the difference between my sallow face and her golden complexion, she had a shade that worked for me. “Do you have shoes that aren’t orthopedic nightmares?” she wanted to know.

I eyed an unopened box on the bathroom floor that contained shoes I had ordered from the same website as the dress. “I might.”

Lisa, unlike her brother, did bother to finish high school. In fact, she ruled the school for a while even though other girls loved to hate her because she was one of those girls who never had the dreaded awkward phase. Lisa had Len and she didn’t make friends easily, so she didn’t really give herself the chance to hang out with another girl until me. It took her a few months to decide that if Len wanted to keep me, she would too. I figured she made the choice more for herself than me. Snarts were selfish creatures who possessed incongruously fierce loyalty to the people they loved. Including me. I wouldn’t have either of them any other way.

Anyhow.

Mick saw me first and he gaped, a bite of sandwich falling out of his open mouth to land on his plate. I was a little bit flattered because he saw me naked that one time, but this outfit apparently topped that. “Nice,” he said, and made a low appreciative noise before he took another bite of his sandwich.

Len froze. I had rendered him speechless. It was awesome.

“Don’t expect my hair to ever behave so well again,” I warned him. “I’m dampening my powers right now to keep the frizz away, but I can’t do that for long.”

Len stood as I moved slowly but surely forward in three inch heels and we met in the middle; he tilted my face up and kissed my chin to avoid smudging the lipstick. I flushed and felt my body clench tight because Len kissed my chin like that when he was inside me the first time we had the sex. “I prefer your snake hair,” he stroked one perfect curl between his thumb and forefinger, “all I want to do with your hair like this is mess it up.”

“Don’t you dare,” I warned him again. “It took forever. It’s going to frizz up all by itself,” I wiggled my fingers at him ominously, “just you wait.”

Len chuckled and kissed my forehead. “Good.”

That’s when we all left the house because I wanted to show the makings of the Rogues my hometown. I went to the dollar store first thing and bought a hot pink lei to adorn the statue of Thor on Viking Way. I had Mick put it on Thor for me because I wasn’t tall enough to do that myself. I patted the hilt of the sword Thor was holding affectionately. “I missed you,” I said to the statue. “I wanted to bring you a silly hat, but I didn’t because the best silly hats are from Viking Fest and I won’t be here in May.”

“Why’d you move to Central City?” Mick asked.

I froze. “I got a job at the university,” I hedged. It wasn’t a lie. I had always planned on moving wherever I could get a job after I finished grad school. I had to skip the whole postgraduate thing because I ended up here, but still. I did have a job at the university. It just wasn’t the reason I lived in Central City.

Mick folded his arms. “Where’s your family?”

“Not here,” I retorted. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Len gave him a warning look. “Mick,” he snarled. “Don’t.”

“You’ve got secrets,” Mick pointed one thick finger at me in accusation, “big ones. I can tell.”

Mick wasn’t all brawn; Len wasn’t all brains. I knew the former was more observant than he let on, for confusion to the enemy and whatnot. “You’re not wrong,” I said, “but my secrets are none of your business. Whatever skeletons I’ve got in my closet aren’t coming back to bite me in the ass. That’s all you need to know.”

Mick grumbled all the way back to the car. I had won the battle, but not the skeleton war.

* * *

Bea got a flight leaving Central City in the afternoon that would arrive in Seattle at night. There was a Cool Objectivity exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum, plus the permanent collections I loved. Len glared pointedly at Mick until he agreed to push me around SAM in a wheelchair. I missed my dad suddenly and viscerally. I missed the crow’s feet at the corners of his warm brown eyes. I missed the puns we made while my mom groaned externally at us in the background. I missed that one freakishly long strand of hair in his left eyebrow he refused to let me pluck and send out to the _Guinness Book of World Records_. I missed how quiet he was, how steady. I missed him complaining whenever I baked cookies or brownies or whatever because he always ended up eating most of them. I missed him turning our house into a series of home improvement projects every summer when school was out and he didn’t have to work. I missed his terribad moose sweater. I missed telling him about my favorite artistic movements and paintings in the National Gallery of Art.

I concentrated on the artwork in front of me. Uccello’s _Episodes from the Aeneid_. Dürer’s _The Sea Monster_. Sellaer’s _Leda and the Swan and Her Children_. Not their children, oddly. Stradanus’ _Allegory_ , the sketch with nudity and the painting without. Goya’s _Disparate de Tontos_ , which loosely translated as “foolish extravagance.” Matisse’s _Winter Landscape on the Base of the Seine_. Pollock’s _Sea Change_. [22]

“I’ve seen those before.” Len tilted his head to indicate the twenty-six “Inflammatory Essays” by Jenny Holzer. “You have prints of these at home.”

“‘Seek not the lightning strike that summons life nor the dark vortex that is death before redemption,’” I whispered more to myself than him. That was ironic as fuck, given my current situation.

Lisa was looking at a different typographic in the series. I couldn’t decide which part of the pink one Lisa would like best. At the beginning: _Don’t relax. I’ll cut the smile off your face_. Or the end: _The game is almost over so it’s time you acknowledge me. Do you want to fall not ever knowing who took you?_

Mick, of course, liked the beige one about guns. That’s what was so cool about art. There’s something for everyone.

“‘Nothing essential changes,’” Len murmured. “‘That is a myth.’”

“‘It will be refuted,’” I quipped.[span title="Jenny Holzer, “Inflammatory Essays” (1979-1982).">23] Len crouched in one smooth motion and kissed me with one hand on my face, the other squeezing my knee through my skirt more for balance than groping while the kiss got intense.

Lisa rolled her eyes and extracted a case of makeup removing wipes from her purse for me. I wiped his face clean of lurid red smudges before I took the remnants of the lipstick off.

“Don’t put more on,” Len said.

I arched my eyebrows at him. “Why?” I asked.

Len stole another kiss and skimmed his tongue over my bottom lip before he pulled back and licked his lips. “Doesn’t taste like you,” he told me with a grin. “I prefer the way you taste without it.”

I was still blushing when a disgruntled Mick wheeled me away.

* * *

In hindsight, I really should’ve gotten two cars.

We picked Bea up from the Sea-Tac airport and she got squished between Lisa and Mick in the backseat. I sat up front because I got carsick otherwise. I had the weakest stomach ever, but I digress. Lisa and I had gone shopping. We had to rearrange our bags around her luggage. Lisa was still wearing the flower crown I bought her at a shop in Pike Place, though, so. That was progress.

“How many books did you buy today?” Bea leaned over to rest her chin on the corner of the passenger seat.

“Not enough,” I retorted. “No incidents with A. R. G. U. S. on your way here?”

“Nope.” Bea shook her head quickly so her green hair bounced in the confines of her messy bun. “Waller didn’t make a move,” she booped my shoulder. “I can’t believe you made me text you every fifteen minutes for three days.”

“It’s not paranoia if they’re actually out to get you,” Len deadpanned.

“Yeah,” I told her, “what he said.”

Mick leaned in so he was uncomfortably close to Bea. “Why are they out to get you?” he asked.

Bea made shooing motions at him with her hand until he sat back in his seat. “I’m the Green Flame,” she told him. I saw recognition flash behind his eyes in the rearview mirror. “After the particle accelerator exploded, I got stuck as living fire. Mac electrocuted me and brought me back to human form.”

“Troubleshooting,” I explained. “I was surprised it worked, actually.”

Mick stroked her verdant hair. “You can become fire,” he said reverently.

Bea smacked the back of his hand imperiously. “Down, boy.”

Mick grinned at her, delighted. “Okay,” he said in a low voice. I knew he would’ve gotten on his knees right there if they were alone together somewhere that wasn’t a cramped backseat.

Yeah. I totally saw that one coming.

* * *

I attracted a thunderstorm like a lightning rod about a month into the vacation. It brewed over the bay, serrating the water and making the very air tremble as thunder boomed cacophonously overhead.

I could feel the lightning, the electricity churning over me. I shuffled across the street without my glasses or cane. I didn’t realize I was half naked and barefoot until Len grabbed my shoulder. “Mac!” he shouted and still I could barely hear him over the storm. “What are you doing?”

“I can feel the storm!” I told him. “I can feel it calling me! I need to do something!”

“What do you think you have to do?” Len shouted back.

“I have no idea!” I yelled.

That’s when the lightning struck me. I felt the electricity jolting through my body, the energy flashing bright in every atom, every part of me supercharged and full of light. Len recoiled and took his hand off me automatically. I didn’t blame him. I was superconductive; he really wasn’t.

I was absorbing the energy, but I wasn’t devouring it like Farooq had. I rendered the storm devoid of thunder by gathering and containing the lightning within my body.

I redirected the condensed energy and it opened a wormhole. I didn’t realize what I had done until the portal fizzled out into residue. There were still clouds above us obscuring the starry night, but I’d hollowed the storm itself out to create a portal. I also caused a countywide blackout. I just didn’t notice until I realized much later that a generator was powering the house instead of the electrical grid. I wasn’t a speedster and I didn’t have access to a particle accelerator, so the wormholes I was capable of opening weren’t stable enough for spacetime travel without a major catalyst.

(Wait for it.)

I looked from Len to where the wormhole had been and said, “Whoops.”

Len touched my shoulder again. “What did you just do?” he asked.

I was buzzed from the lightning in my veins, my hair frizzing like agitated serpents despite the rainfall. “I think my powers escalated,” I said.

I was caught up in the implications of it, in particular the possibility of seeing my family again. I didn’t want to leave him, but maybe I didn’t have to—maybe I could have the best of both worlds.

* * *

[1] Julie Jackham first appeared in _The Flash_ Vol. 2, No. 170 (“Blood Will Run, Part 1: Breaking the Foundation”) March, 2001.

[2] Masters of Library and Information Science and Masters of Museology and Archival Studies. Basically, the degree Evie Carnahan from _The Mummy_ (1999) would’ve gotten if she existed in the 21st century.

[3] I prefer the 1982 version of “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, but if the Britney Spears cover from 2002 is your jam, then you do you. I totally rocked out to her self-titled album when I was eleven. Don’t judge me.

[4] There are many texts lost to history, and the _Catalogue of Women_ is one of them. There are ~1,300 partial lines—between a third and a quarter of the original poem—that survived, but much of the poem was lost. Ergo, the fragments at the CCU library on Arrowverse Earth-1 in this story are lost on Earth-33 in the “real” world. Things like the _Ehoiai_ fragments get stolen from special collections libraries too often. Len must get paid for something when he isn’t letting Mick set abstract paintings worth $25,000,000 on fire. That’s what he does for money, I guess.

[5] John Donne, “Meditation XVII” from _Devotions upon Emergent Occasions_ (1624).

[6] Bea da Costa first appeared in _Infinity, Inc._ Vol. 1, No. 32 (“You Can Call Me Psycho!”) November, 1986 and she was mentioned in _The Flash_ 1x07 (“Power Outage”) 25 November 2014 as one of the supposed casualties of the particle accelerator explosion.

[7] Beverly Lewis a.k.a. Fiona Webb first appeared in _Flash_ Vol. 1, No. 285 (“If, at First, You Don’t Succeed”) May, 1980.

[8] Ray Bradbury, _Fahrenheit 451_ (1953).

[9] Greek fire as green flame is first mentioned in _The Sea of Monsters_ by Rick Riordan (2006).

[10] Ramon Corvalho first appeared in _Checkmate_ Vol. 2, No. 11 (“Corvalho, Part 1”) April, 2007.

[11] Lewis Carroll, _Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland_ (1865).

[12] Farooq Amar first appeared in _Flashpoint_ Vol. 2, No. 1 (“Part 1 of 5”) July, 2011.

[13] Rose appeared in _The Flash_ Vol. 3, No. 8 (“Reverse-Flash: Rebirth”) February, 2011.

[14] Daniel Cassidy first appeared in _Firestorm_ Vol. 2, No. 24 (“Blue Devil”) June, 1984.

[15] Central City is analogous to Kansas City, Missouri and 816 is the KC area code. 555 is the universal beginning to all fake phone numbers, and 7609 is how you’d write “snow” on a keypad if your phone was from 2004.

[16] LMFAO feat. Lil Jon, “Shots” from _Party Rock_ (2009).

[17] Foreigner, “Hot Blooded” from _Double Vision_ (1978).

[18] Dr. Seuss, _How the Grinch Stole Christmas!_ (1957).

[19] Lester is based on Len’s grandfather, who first appeared in _The Flash_ Vol. 2, No. 182 (“Absolute Zero”) March, 2002.

[20] Len says this repeatedly in _The Flash: Season Zero_ Vol. 1, No. 11 (“Fire  & Ice”) October, 2015. I’ll admit I was super disappointed season zero didn’t take place during the months Barry was comatose. I want to know where all of the metahumans were at before he woke up.

[21] Mindy Nettifee, “This Is the Nonsense of Love” from _Sleepyhead Assassins_ (2006).

[22] All paintings and other artwork listed here are on display at the Seattle Art Museum.

[23] Jenny Holzer, “Inflammatory Essays” (1979-1982).


	2. The Initiation

**We are, I am, you are**  
**by cowardice or courage**  
**the ones who find our way**  
**back to this scene**  
**carrying a knife, a camera**  
**a book of myths**  
**in which  
**our names do not appear.****

Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck”

* * *

Shock Value  
**Part 1**  
_A Book of Myths in Which Our Names Do Not Appear_  
**Act II**  
The Initiation

* * *

**Causality** , _n_.

1\. The idea that something is capable of causing another thing to happen or exist.

2\. The relationship between a cause and its effect or between regularly correlated events or phenomena.

3\. A causal quality or agency.

* * *

**Scene I  
** The Road of Trials

* * *

I expected Len to propose on March ninth, our first anniversary. Which was probably why he didn’t. Len was nothing to me if not unexpected.

We all returned to Central City a week later. I’d made a glitch in the system give me extra vacation days so I wouldn’t lose my job at the university. I was at the library when Vincent Santini pulled a snatch and grab on my boyfriend and his partner in crime. Rafael Santini was a Gothamite mobster who feuded with the Penguin in the comics. Len chased the Santini family out of Central City, so maybe they ended up in Gotham. Cisco was so right when he said we were living in a causal nexus, but more on that later.

I met Bea for drinks after work at the bar where Lisa met Cisco for the first time. I watched Barry walk out, feeling the lightning inside him crackling softly when he moved. I wondered if he knew exactly how much of him was supercharged at all times.

Len spent the night at the Santini mansion with Lisa and Mick while Cisco was building them new guns. I was used to sleeping with him in both the literal and figural sense of the phrase by then. I couldn’t believe I’d gotten used to that. I hated sleeping alone at this point even though I loathed the idea of sharing my bed with someone for years. I was lonely, but I also liked having time for myself. I spent the night formulating a tentative plan. If the singularity was full of energy, I might be able to siphon enough power from it to open a stable wormhole and return to Earth-33.

I could tell my parents what happened to me. I could make sure they knew that I had found the reality where I belonged.

* * *

Lisa called me from the road at night because Mick flamed out the rear tires on the truck full of money Len wanted to steal and Barry crashed their motorcycles. Lisa drove us back to my house with millions stuffed in the trunk of my car.

I called Len from the passenger seat. “Hi,” I said. “We got the money. We’re taking it home and then I’m coming back for you.”

“We?” Len grinned so hard I could hear it in his voice. “You’re helping us pull a job, hmm?”

“Well,” I huffed, “it’s not like I have a choice at this point. I wasn’t going to leave your sister in the middle of the street with the cops on their way.”

“Hey!” Mick said indignantly from the backseat. “What about me?”

I flailed one hand at him to shut him up. “Snart means ‘soon’ in Swedish,” I said. “That’s when I’ll see you. Love you.”

“Love you too,” Len said in that low intimate voice. “See you soon.”

* * *

I was having lunch with Bea when Axel Walker dropped bombs all over the city. There was a gust of wind that blew half a dozen explosives into the restaurant. I generated an electromagnetic field strong enough to shield the other patrons from the explosions while Bea incinerated the shrapnel before it did permanent damage to anyone or anything. I waited until the dust settled to power down and exhaled a soft whoosh of air in the aftermath.

Bea swore in Portuguese. I didn’t know the language, but curse words had a pretty universal tone. “That wasn’t another metahuman,” she realized. “Are people just bombing the city now?”

I sighed and dropped the shield while the dust cleared. “I guess so.” I accessed the internet with my mind and choked on thin air when I got an eyeful of the original Trickster in a unitard. “It’s like if Luke Skywalker and the Joker had a baby,” I groaned externally. “I need to bleach my brain.”

“Who’s the Joker?” Bea asked.

Apparently interdimensional word vomit was a thing I had. “Never mind.” I extracted my phone from my pocket. I was in the process of texting Len when I felt someone tug on the hem of my dress. I looked down at the little girl standing next to me.

“There’s lightning in your hair,” she told me.

I snarled my fingers through my hair and collected the static in my palm. I was tempted to eat it, because sparks actually tasted like delicious candy to me, but I didn’t want to freak people out.

Instead her mother thanked me and Bea for saving them, and everyone in the restaurant followed suit. “D’you have names?” the little girl asked. “Like the Flash?”

“Fire,” Bea told her. Green Flame was associated with her unintentional arson, so I suggested her other codename from the comics and it stuck.[1]

I hadn’t chosen between Galvanism and Voltage, neither of which had been taken by characters from the comics. I liked Galvanism because of its etymology, but Voltage was pithier. “I cannot pick,” I said forlornly.

That’s when the little girl patted my thigh in sympathy. I smiled at her while the restaurant manager informed Bea that our meals were on the house. I decided right then and there what I was going to change about this reality. _The Flash_ consistently portrayed metahumans other than Barry as monsters, with him as the exception to prove the rule. I was going to put a stop to those shenanigans. Bea and I were proof otherwise and I had to make sure the city knew it too.

I decided this was a place to start.

* * *

I overheard Eobard telling Barry how to phase through solid objects when he said, “Barry, feel the lightning, feel its power, its electricity pumping through your veins, crackling through you, traveling to every nerve in your body like a shock. You’re no longer you now. You’re part of something greater, part of a speed force. It’s yours. Now do it.”

I was on top of Len at the time because watching a movie had become foreplay on the couch. Len had put me on his lap and my fingers were digging into his ribcage while he teased my nipples. I generated static and shocked him by accident. Len clenched his jaw and bit down around my nipple, his teeth sinking into the flesh of my left breast hard enough to leave a mark. I jolted and zapped him again.

“Sorry,” I gasped. “Did I hurt you?”

Len shook his head and grinned smugly as he lifted my breast to examine the mark he had left. “I liked that,” he told me. “Do it again, hmm?”

I generated a low voltage of electricity and experimentally smoothed my supercharged fingers down his bare chest. Len hissed at the sensation and I stopped touching him because I couldn’t tell if that was a good noise or not.

“Didn’t tell you to stop,” he growled and grabbed my ass to grind the hard length of him against me through his pants. “Do it again.”

“Adrenaline junkie,” I said fondly.

Len hummed in agreement, then hissed again when I did what he wanted. Apparently it was a good noise. I felt his cock twitch. I kissed his neck and nipped his collarbone, tasting the salt of his sweat in the hollow of his throat. Len shuddered when I slipped my hand inside his pants and stroked the head of him, rubbing his precome in with my fingertips still charged, and he came all over my palm.

“Sorry,” he said in a voice rendered hoarse by the intensity of his orgasm. “Didn’t see that coming.”

I giggled, because that was a terribad pun, before I took my hand out of his pants and licked his semen up. Len waited until my hand was clean before he sat me back on the couch and took his pants off. I watched him kneel and my breath caught in my throat. “Does it count as a handjob if I barely touched you?” I wondered.

“Don’t know.” Len hooked his thumbs over the waistband of my panties and yanked them off. “Doesn’t matter.”

“This is the first time you’ve come before me,” I retorted. “I’m usually a big needy mess by the time you go. It’s nice to know I can make you feel the same way.”

Len burst out laughing and pressed his temple against my kneecap. “I’ve felt the same way since we started this,” he told me. “Need you safe,” he kissed the knob of my knee. “Need you happy,” he put my thighs on his shoulders. “Need you with me,” he splayed one hand across my belly to hold me down. “Need all of _this_.”

That’s when he flicked his tongue over me. I mapped the curve of his skull with my fingers while he ate me out, my hips bucking up beneath his face as I squirmed and moaned his name. Len hummed against me and pressed his mouth over my clit. I came so hard the orgasm sang electric through my whole body. Len slipped one long finger into me and crooked it while he moved to sit beside me and wiped his mouth with the back of his other hand. I ended up sitting on his lap again with my back pressed against his chest.

Len wrapped his other arm tight around my waist to hold me where he wanted me and spread my thighs apart with his knees. “So wet,” he murmured in my ear while he worked a second finger inside me. “Say my name again, Mac.”

“Len...” I clung to the back of his skull with one hand and moaned when he kissed his way from behind my ear and down my neck. I could feel the mark he left around my nipple, a twinge I knew would bruise later.

Len kept stirring my cunt up with his fingers until I came again, then lifted my hips so his cock slipped inside me while I trembled with aftershocks. I tucked my calves on either side of his thighs for leverage and started to move. “Now tell me you love me,” he growled while I bounced up and down on his cock.

I let my head fall back against his chest and whimpered as the buildup to a third orgasm coiled tight between my legs. “I love you,” I told him.

Len turned my head and nipped my jaw. “I love you too,” he murmured into the hollow under the hinge of my jaw. I fell apart with a sharp, loud sound and clenched around him again. Len buried his face between my neck and shoulder with a groan and came inside me a few thrusts later.

I reached behind me to stroke his short hair. Len nuzzled my neck and I felt him slip out of me. “That’s going to stain the couch,” I muttered.

“Wouldn’t be the first time.” Len chuckled and kissed my shoulder. “I’ll clean the cushion and turn it over, hmm?”

“I think it has a removable cover,” I told him, “so it can go in the washing machine.” I made no move to make it happen, though. I snuggled back against him instead.

“Never had a home before,” Len murmured. “Lisa, yes. This city, sure. Never a house, though. My grandfather lived in a trailer park. My dad…” he exhaled sharply, “living with him didn’t feel like home. Never did.”

That’s when I burst into tears. Len thanked me for crying over him again before he left me on the couch to strip the cushion and put the cover in the laundry basket. I went to the bathroom to do my lady business—I had to free the pee and brush my teeth and wash my face and whatnot—before I shuffled into our bedroom, put on a camisole and a new pair of underwear, and then flopped into bed.

I had never felt truly content before. Not sustainably. There were moments when I wasn’t in pain or anxious, when I’d finished reading a good book with a satisfying ending, when I hung out with my friends or my sister, but it didn’t last. Neither would this, because my pain was practically constant and I always got anxious eventually, but sex with Len was better than I had ever hoped it could be with anyone. That alone was enough to keep my anxiety quiet for a while.

I took off my glasses and opened my book. I wasn’t supposed to read with my glasses on because I was nearsighted as fuck. Len crawled into bed with me and kissed me softly. I nuzzled his nose with mine after he broke the kiss and squinted at him when he pulled away. Len smiled and my heart actually fluttered a little bit. “You’re so cute,” he told me.

“You left a bruise.” I yanked the collar of my camisole down to show him.

Len smirked at me. “You liked it.” I shivered when he gently swirled his fingertip over my exposed areola. “Want me to do it again?”

That’s when I realized he might not have bitten me in the heat of the moment because I made him lose control. Len was more experienced than me; he must’ve known I would feel the bruise whenever I moved and remember how I got it every time I felt it ache. That must’ve been the point. I blushed at the epiphany. “Maybe,” I hedged. “Not tonight, okay?” Len held up his hands in mock surrender while I adjusted my camisole until it covered my breast again. “If you want to bite me again,” I told him, “ask permission first. I have the highest pain tolerance, obviously, but that doesn’t mean I like it.”

Len folded his arms while I put my glasses back on. “You didn’t like it?” he asked. I could feel his nonverbal _I don’t believe you_ even though I wasn’t looking at his face.

“I did,” I told him, “but if you want to make the biting a regular thing, you need to tell me where you want to do it so I can decide if I can handle the bruises in the aftermath. There’s no real aftercare for this,” I flailed one hand at my breast, “it’s just me dealing with another kind of pain, which I don’t really mind, but this is my body and I’d like a warning before you decide to mark it again.”

That’s when he realized this was another rape survivor thing. Len was a control freak, planning his jobs obsessively, counting the seconds, because using control like a weapon was how he coped with being an abuse survivor. I was pretty much the same way, except I used explicit verbal negotiation and consent with him during sex because the violence that happened to me was sexual in nature. “Sorry,” he said despite a total lack of remorse. I knew he was apologizing for pushing his luck, not using his teeth on me. That was good enough.

“Liar,” I retorted.

Len grinned and curled his fingers into my hair. “Want to go again?” he asked. “No biting, I promise.”

I arched my eyebrows at him. “Don’t you ever cool down?”

“Not with you,” Len told me in that low, intimate voice. “Things heat up. I get turned on just looking at you sometimes. Like right now.”

I peeled back the blankets and moved to kneel between his legs. “That sucks,” I hooked my fingers over the waistband of his underwear and held his gaze while I worked it down slowly. “Want me to kiss it better?”

“Yes,” Len hissed when I stroked my thumb over the underside of his cock from base to head. I generated a spark inside my mouth and did the same thing with my tongue. Len tangled both hands in my hair and moaned. “Do that again,” he growled. I wrapped my hand around his cock and swirled my charged thumb over the head of him while I sucked his balls into my mouth instead. Len tried to fuck my face after I finally took him into my mouth. I pulled back and his ensuing groan turned into a hoarse chuckle. “Mac,” he said my name so lowly I felt a sweet ache start up again between my legs, “are you teasing me?”

I swallowed him to the hilt and hummed my answer, curling my tongue along his shaft and generating tiny sparks as I sucked his cock. I was getting better at this, because he came pretty fast again. I managed to swallow it all, probably because he had come twice before that night.

Len used one hand in my hair to pull me up into a thorough kiss. I felt his other hand slipping into my panties from behind and tugged his bottom lip between my teeth before I broke the kiss. “Don’t tease me,” I booped his nose as a warning. “I want to finish my book at a quasi-reasonable hour.”

“Such a librarian,” Len murmured. “Now tell me that stealing books is wrong.”

“So wrong,” I deadpanned. “Hell, stealing art is wrong too because you’re depriving the world of the artwork—” Len rubbed his fingertips over my clit gently at first to make sure I wasn’t oversensitized from before, then rougher once I didn’t tell him to stop. “That’s…” I whimpered. “That’s why I wanted to scan the _Ehoiai_ fragments before you stole them. So they…” I clutched at his shoulders when my hips lurched forward without my permission, “…wouldn’t be lost to the world.”

Ironically, the fragments of the _Catalogue of Women_ he stole from CCU had gotten lost to history in the reality where I grew up. That made them even more important to me.

Len swirled two fingertips into my wet hole and I squeaked at how much I ached to have those fingers all the way inside me. “Want more?” he asked even though he could’ve deduced the answer by feeling how slick I was.

“Yes,” I gasped, “please.”

Here’s the thing: I was the overthinking champion of the multiverse. I got a trophy and everything. Cisco made it for me, but I digress. I didn’t like being fingered before. I figured it was because the last person who tried was my rapist, not only because I wasn’t attracted to him, but also because he didn’t bother with enough foreplay to get me wet enough for it to feel any good. Also, I could feel the difference in texture between finger and fingernail, which was jarring when the dude sticking his fingers in you didn’t know where your g-spot or clitoris was—or what a g-spot or clitoris was, for that matter—and therefore couldn’t distract you from overthinking.

Len was very good at distracting me. Let’s put it that way.

* * *

I felt the swarm of mechanical bees under the command of Brie Larvan, whose existence confirmed my hypothesis that everything would be awesome if all of the comic book dudes were ladies instead.[2] Once a bee flew in between my glasses and my eyeball, so I was terrified of bees. I was happy to stay far, far away from those shenanigans.

I felt Cisco defibrillate Barry and felt it again when Barry returned the favor. I knew the big reveal about Eobard was going to happen later that night, and part of me wanted to reveal myself at the inopportune moment. I wanted Cisco to help me choose a codename. I wanted to help Caitlin with her metahuman research and talk her into actually rehabilitating the other metahumans in the pipeline instead of just leaving them to rot down there with the exoskeleton of the particle accelerator. I wanted to tell Iris that I hated the decision to keep her in the dark all season on multiple levels. I wanted to disempower Eobard and become part of Team Flash, except that I couldn’t do any of that without possibly risking my way back to the reality where I grew up.

If they never opened a wormhole to send Eobard back to his future, Eddie wouldn’t kill himself and the singularity wouldn’t happen. It was selfish, but I needed the singularity to become a thing so I could see my family one last time.

I told myself that I was letting the story take its course.

I didn’t sleep for a week.

* * *

**Scene II  
 ** Meeting with the Goddess

* * *

Len eventually realized my insomnia had gotten worse and he dosed me with melatonin to put me out like a flame trapped under a jar. I slept for twenty-nine hours straight and woke up after the trap to make Eobard confess to killing Nora Allen failed epically and Hannibal Bates was shot. Barry, Cisco, and Caitlin had met Gideon and seen the cameras Eobard had set up all over the place, so the feeds went dark that week.

Len proposed to me while the Flash was fighting a telepathic gorilla. I had gotten awesome at blocking my ability to sense the energy Barry generated when he ran, so I only knew it was happening because I had seen the show. I thought it was date night so I got into my car, which he drove more often than not because technically I wasn’t supposed to drive.

I buckled myself into the passenger seat and raised my eyebrows until they disappeared under my bangs when he held up a blindfold. “No,” I said.

Len tilted his head. “Don’t you trust me?” he asked.

“Oh, please.” I huffed. “Don’t pull that manipulative crap with me,” my voice softened, “you know I do. I wouldn’t let you touch me if I didn’t trust you and I let you touch me copious amounts.”

“Yes,” Len grinned at me. “Yes you do.” I could tell he was pleased to have my trust, and that we had gotten to a point in our relationship where physical contact no longer freaked me the fuck out. “Now trust me and wear the blindfold, Mac.”

“This isn’t going to be a kinky public sex thing, is it?” I asked before I took my glasses off and let him put the blindfold on me. “I’m not consenting to a kinky public sex thing by wearing this, Len.”

“Noted,” Len whispered in my ear and stole a quick kiss before he started the car.

It took everything I had to stop myself from using my powers to access traffic camera footage or GPS or basically anything that would tell me where he was taking me. I did trust him, but my anxiety got louder the longer I went sightless. Unluckily, anxiety was not a rational beast.

Len parked and got out of the car, which I knew because I heard him move the parking brake and unlatch his door. I snatched my glasses up and pocketed them before he opened my door for me and let him lead me to wherever we were going. Len held my arthritic right hand gently in his while my left hand was occupied with my cane. I had my brace on because it was a bad wrist day. I had also moved my tarnished silver and garnet ring—a present from my mom for my sixteenth birthday—to my right hand because he told me he was going to propose and I used to wear it on my left middle finger, where it would’ve clashed with an engagement ring. I explained that to him when he asked why I was wearing my ring on a different finger, and he’d gotten the message loud and clear.

Len sat me down somewhere cold that felt like smooth hard stone and took the blindfold off. I put my glasses back on and looked over my shoulders in turn. Len had brought me to the Palladium, a former concert hall turned open air nightclub in the theatre district. It had closed after the particle accelerator explosion knocked half the domed ceiling down.

I loved the Palladium.[3] I had brought Len here before, told him that I had bought the building and electrified the fence to keep people from destroying it further with graffiti and garbage, and explained that it reminded me of my favorite John Hughes movie, _Some Kind of Wonderful_. [4] I liked it because Amanda slapped her abusive ex across the face more than once and decided she would rather stand up on her own than be with Keith. I would’ve preferred the movie to end in polyamory involving Watts, Amanda, and Keith, but that could wait until they met again at their high school reunion or something.

That’s when I noticed he was down on one knee. There was also a ring: a pretty, eight carat, emerald cut, enhanced blue diamond solitaire in a platinum claw setting. “Yes,” I said.

“Mac,” Len smirked at me, “I haven’t asked yet.”

“Technically you asked months ago,” I retorted, “but if you’d prefer to pop the question when you already have the answer you wanted, then go for it.”

“Mac,” Len held my gaze, “will you—”

“Yes,” I said. Len frowned and made a frustrated noise low in his throat. “Sorry,” I giggled, “now I’m just fucking with you. Seriously, go for it.”

Len cleared his throat of frustration and focused on the winning speech he must’ve prepared before he made his proposal. “Mac,” he said, “I told you I wanted to marry you before. That hasn’t changed. I thought romantic love wasn’t real until we met,” he reached out and put his other hand on my knee, “but then you stole my heart and became my home. This is what I want,” he brushed his thumb over my kneecap through my stocking as he spoke. “This is part of my plan for us. I can’t imagine my future without you. I want you with me. I want you to be my wife. I want to be with you for the rest of our lives. I’m all in, Mac. I love you. So,” he stopped touching my knee to offer me the ring, “will you marry me?”

“Yes,” I swallowed thickly and made a doomed effort not to cry. “These are good tears,” I told him as he gently took my hand and slipped the ring on my finger.

“I know,” he interlaced our fingers and kissed me triumphantly.

I broke the kiss when his other hand went under my skirt. “I don’t want to have celebratory post-engagement sex here,” I said.

“Why not?” Len wanted to know. “I want you,” his thumb brushed where the lace top of my stocking met my bare thigh and I shivered, “you want me,” he slipped his hand between my legs to cup me through my panties, “and we can do whatever we want. Nobody is going to stop us.”

“Wait,” I said, “you totally shut off my electric fence to get in here.”

Len shook his head slowly. “I temporarily shut off your electric fence,” he said. “I didn’t know how long we’d be here and I didn’t want any interruptions. I have a device that will shut it off again when we leave.”

I nodded. “I’m on top,” I told him. “I won’t lie back on the stage. This is porous stone. That’s gross.”

“Someday we’re going to work on your aversions,” Len told me. “I still want to have sex with you outside before we die.”

“I know people fantasize about having sex on the beach or against trees and whatnot,” I retorted, “but literally all I can think about when I picture sex in the woods is how sticky tree sap is, and with sex on the beach, all I can think about is sand in places you do not want it. This is all of the outside sex you’re going to get,” I told him, “take it or leave it.”

Len grinned at me, his teeth a flash of white in the dark. “I’ll take it.”

That’s how I ended up straddling him on the edge of the Palladium stage with my dress in a pile along with his shirt and jacket, his pants undone and my bra unhooked; the crotch of my underwear had been pushed aside to dig into the crease of my thigh, and my stockings were the only thing keeping me from touching the porous stone. Len cupped my breasts while I rode him so I writhed all over his cock at the friction of his thumbs and forefingers brushing over my nipples. I slipped one hand between my legs and generated a spark on top of my clit. I came so hard my hips snapped against his. Len groaned and fucked me through it until he came inside me.

I ran my fingers through my sweaty bangs and renegotiated my breasts into the cups of my bra. Len shrugged his shirt back on while his cock twitched and softened within me. I nuzzled his nose with mine and untangled myself from him before I pulled my dress over my head again. “So,” I stretched the long _o_ sound out awkwardly, “did you steal my ring or what?”

Len shook his head slowly. “I didn’t steal it,” he told me. “Not technically. I bought it with money I got from pulling jobs, but I didn’t steal the ring itself.”

“Why?” I blurted, genuinely surprised that my engagement ring wasn’t hot.

Len shrugged after he finished buttoning his shirt. “Don’t want anyone to ever take it away from you.”

That’s when I crawled into his lap and kissed him again, nipping at his bottom lip hard enough to draw a low noise from his throat.

I still couldn’t believe I had to get sucked into another dimension to find a man that wanted to marry me.

* * *

I married him at the courthouse a few days later with Lisa and Bea as our witnesses. I was never the girl who wanted a big wedding. That was something my mom wanted for me and something I was totally willing to give her, even though I screamed internally whenever I thought about it. I wanted her there so badly it hurt the whole time despite how much I wanted this. At least I’d worn my grandmother’s pearl necklace to graduation so I had that for my something old, my black wedding dress festooned with off-white polka dots was something new, the engagement ring was something blue, and Bea had “borrowed” a pair of designer shoes from her former roommate for me. Fiona Webb apparently had freakishly small feet too.

I kept thinking about some old wedding superstition: _married in black, you’ll wish yourself back_. [5] Ironic.

Mick claimed he was the best man even though Len didn’t ask him to be since we weren’t having a huge ceremony. This provoked a verbal catfight between Lisa and Bea over who the maid of honor was.

“Technically neither of you is a maid,” I said, “because the word has a virginal connotation that nobody here denotes. I love you both. Now quit glowering at each other and be happy I didn’t make you wear terribad bridesmaids’ dresses.”

That actually made the officiant laugh. At least nobody was holding the poor woman at gunpoint. Yeah, I was surprised too. Apparently people didn’t recognize Len as Captain Cold without his parka and goggles.

I legally changed my surname to Snart. I wanted to shed my fake surname, so even though I was doing what my mom scorned and conforming to patriarchal expectations by taking his name, I felt completely sure. I was Mackenzie Snart. I liked to think I was meant to be.

Len took us to Saints and Sinners in the aftermath. I noticed Mick and Bea left the bar together. I knew something was going on between them in Poulsbo, but I didn’t know it was still happening. Lisa was busy hustling people at pool and I low-key threw my bouquet at her before we made our exit. I didn’t hear whatever my new sister hollered at me, but I assumed it was something like “Bitch!” in the most affectionate sense of the word, the same way Lisa called Len a jerk and he called her a trainwreck.

I really had become part of their family. There was cognitive dissonance, right on time again.

Len didn’t carry me across our threshold, but he did carry me into our bedroom. I made shooing gestures at him with my hands when he tried to crawl on top of me. Len stood at the foot of our bed and cocked his head curiously at me. I shooed at him until he took a few steps back, then stood and undressed myself as slowly as possible until I wore the pair of off-white stockings and matching garter belt I had on underneath my wedding dress and nothing else. “I want to show you something,” I told him.

“I’ve seen you naked before, Mrs. Snart.” Len grinned at how my married name sounded, his possessiveness showing.

I held one hand out to keep him away before I scooted back against the pillows and charged the fingers of both hands with electricity. I held his gaze and slipped my hands between my legs, spreading myself open before I used two fingertips to tease my wet hole while he watched. “I knew you liked this,” I told him. “I wanted to see whether it worked for me too.” Which it did. “Len,” I moaned his name and jolted when my hips bucked under my own hand, “I wanted to show you this.” That’s when I focused on my clit and made a herculean effort to keep my eyes on his while my orgasm built up and my whole body clenched tight. I came so hard and fast my spine arched back against the pillows and my glasses fogged up for a second.

Len crawled to kneel between my legs and ran his fingers through my hair, yielding sparks that I snuffed out before they burned the covers. “That,” he said in that low intimate voice with a fervent thread woven through it, “was sexy as hell, Mac.”

“I’ve never used my powers to masturbate in front of you before. I know you like to watch,” I reached out to stroke my thumb over his collarbone. “I thought you’d like to see that.”

“Yes,” Len smiled and pinned my wrists to the headboard with one hand, “you know me too well, Mrs. Snart.”

That’s when he used his other hand and teasingly rubbed the head of him into my hole to make me moan before he buried himself in me to the hilt. I ended up with my legs spread back while he fucked me into the mattress, both my hands intertwined with one of his as the other lingered all over me; touching my breasts, teasing my nipples, gently mapping the stretch marks from my sternum to below my navel. Finally he tangled his fingers in the hair at the nape of my neck and kissed me, his thrusts becoming less meticulous and more frenzied. I whimpered against his mouth when I came again. I got an idea and conducted electricity inside me while I clenched around his cock. Len slumped over me when he came, groaning and shuddering from the intensity of his orgasm. “Mac,” he said hoarsely. “That was…”

“Yeah,” I retorted. “I’m awesome.”

Len chuckled against my neck and propped himself up on his elbows to look at me. “How’s your wrist, hmm?” he asked.

I realized that he’d held my hands instead of my wrists to avoid hurting me. “I’m fine,” I told him. “I’m not in any more pain than usual.”

“I just hate that you’re in pain at all,” Len murmured.

“There’s no cure for RA,” I reminded him gently. “I’m always going to be in pain. Don’t stress over a problem you can’t solve.”

Len clenched his jaw and made a disgruntled noise. “Want anything?” he asked.

I shook my head slowly and my frizzy hair frothed over my shoulders. “I have everything I want,” I said.

It wasn’t a lie. At least not then.

* * *

I used not missing work as my excuse for turning down a honeymoon, but really it was because Len needed to be around for Barry to find and I figured we could always honeymoon later. I was there at the bar with him waiting in our booth when Barry arrived. I told my old friend the jukebox to play “Cold as Ice” while they spoke.[6] Len kept Barry from seeing me because he knew by now what the Flash did to other metahumans and he didn’t want me to end up in the pipeline. Barry didn’t notice his wedding ring. Len didn’t tell me what he asked for when he wrote something on a napkin, but he did tell me when he decided to ask Barry to erase his criminal records.

“Why?” I asked.

“Well,” Len shrugged, “this way they can’t arrest me again.”

I didn’t tell him that he was wrong because he ended up back in jail after he killed his father. Which made no sense because he was imprisoned without due process. I figured a jury would’ve sympathized with his reasons for killing his father if his case had actually gone to trial. I also supposed Barry could’ve made a backup of the digital evidence against Len that he deleted from the C. C. P. D., A. R. G. U. S., and F. B. I. servers, but I doubted he thought of that in the heat of the moment because the whole Eobard thing was going on, and it wasn’t confirmed onscreen, so. I didn’t bring any of that up because it hadn’t technically happened yet in this reality. I booped his nose and said, “go for it.”

“Thank you.” Len kissed me thoroughly, meticulously, and left me wanting in the car while he broke into S. T. A. R. Labs to renegotiate with Barry. I texted Lisa to bring his motorcycle with the customized rig for his gun on the handlebars to S. T. A. R. Labs and drove home after I told her to tell him that I would sabotage the truck with the metahumans inside for them. I guess sabotaging the truck was technically my idea. Whoops.

I overheard Cisco give Lisa her codename before I sabotaged the dampers he was using to disempower the other metahumans. Golden Glider and Captain Cold, alliteration everywhere. I felt Mark Mardon—more alliteration for the win!—brew a storm and strike Barry with lightning while I wondered how lightning could hurt Barry when he was basically made of the stuff now.

I was cooking dinner when I heard the motorcycle grind to a halt in the driveway. Len hung up his parka and took his boots off in the hallway before he came into the kitchen in his sock feet. I could feel Barry fighting Eobard at S. T. A. R. Labs, feel the electricity generated by them as they ran. I was so lost in the energy I didn’t know he was home until Len turned my swivel chair and cupped my face as he crouched to kiss me. I smoothed my hands from his chest to his neck and stroked my thumbs along his jawline, which had gotten rough with stubble. Len kissed my chin and then whispered conspiratorially in my ear, “If my sister weren’t here right now I’d lift you onto the island and go down on you until you couldn’t walk for reasons that have nothing do to with your RA.”

“Rude,” I huffed. “Lisa, smack your brother upside the head for me.”

“Why can’t you do it yourself?” Lisa wanted to know.

“I don’t hit abuse survivors,” I told her. “Also we’re totally married now, so that would be domestic violence, and I’m not a criminal.”

Len chuckled and kissed my forehead. “Keep telling yourself that,” he said.

I didn’t like where he was going. “Those metahumans were locked up for months in cages like animals with no bathroom facilities or fresh clothes,” I retorted. I figured that in the “real” world the actors had specific costumes for their characters and that’s why they didn’t have different clothes to wear between whenever they got captured and their escape, but in this reality the implications of the pipeline were inhumane as fuck. Shawna Baez probably wouldn’t have attacked Caitlin if they hadn’t kept her caged for three and a half months just for a prison break with a side of petty theft. Fight me. “That was unacceptable. I did the right thing.”

Len tilted my face up and held my gaze. “I won’t let that happen to you,” he said with slow vehemence. “I promise.”

I took his hand in both of mine and kissed the inside of his wrist. “I know,” I told him before I kissed the fleshy part of his palm. Len always kept his promises, after all.

I kept watching the clock over dinner. Len noticed, but he didn’t call me on it until Lisa was gone. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

I knew he might not ever forgive me if I didn’t tell him what I was about to do. I sighed and decided to bite the bullet. “There’s something else you should know,” I told him. I shuffled into our bedroom, sat on the foot of our bed, and opened my laptop.

Len sat beside me and watched me click on my video folder. I started playing the pilot episode of _The Flash_. “What’s this?” he asked when the opening narration began. I didn’t answer him. I let it play through for a few minutes until I noticed he was looking at me instead of the screen. “Mac,” he said. “I don’t understand.”

I clicked on his first episode and skipped to his foiled attempt to steal the Kahndaq dynasty diamond. “I’m from a parallel universe where you’re a fictional character on a TV show adapted from a series of comics,” I said. “I know that’s not easy to believe.”

Len shrugged. I guess living somewhere full of metahumans helped with suspension of disbelief. “Mac,” he said, “you’ve explained the many worlds interpretation to me before. This doesn’t come as a shock. It actually makes a lot of sense. That’s why you never talk about your family, isn’t it?” I nodded.[7] “What I don’t understand,” he told me, “is why you’re telling me this now.”

“I have to go back to the world from whence I came in a few hours,” I whispered.

“No,” Len snarled. “Not happening.”

“Not forever,” I told him. “Len, my family has no idea where I went or what happened to me. It’s been a year and a half. They probably think I got abducted, or murdered, or sold by human traffickers, or raped, y’know, again. I have to make sure they know I’m okay.”

“Didn’t you promise to forsake all others in our wedding vows?” Len said in the deceptively calm voice that meant he was trying not to lose his cool. “That includes other worlds, Mac.”

“I know,” I told him, “and I promise to keep those vows after I see my family one last time. I know you wouldn’t forsake your world for me.” After all, Lisa was here and he loved her best. I had known that before I really knew him. “I have to do this before I forsake mine forever.”

“Doesn’t mean I have to let you go,” Len told me through clenched teeth.

“Well, you know what they say.” I quipped. “If you love something, let it go.”

Len snorted. “If it’s meant to be, you’ll come back to me?”

“I promise.” I nuzzled his nose with mine. “I love you.”

Len grabbed me by the hair and kissed me so hard I made a soft noise in the back of my throat. “I love you too,” he pressed our foreheads together and closed his eyes. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

That went better than I expected. I kissed him again softly and shuffled off to put on the outfit I had worn for graduation.

I categorically refused to say goodbye.

* * *

**Scene III  
** Woman as Temptress

* * *

I hadn’t been to S. T. A. R. Labs in almost a year and a half. In hindsight, maybe I should’ve let Caitlin study me. At least then I would’ve known how to find the bathroom from whence I came. Alas, I didn’t. It was a huge building, okay? There was a significant amount we didn’t see on the show and I got stuck circumnavigating it. That’s how I ended up wandering around S. T. A. R. Labs waiting for Barry to open a wormhole. I tried accessing a map of the laboratory with my brain and it didn’t help because I have a terribad sense of direction. I ended up in the pipeline after Barry ran back in time for a minute and fifty-two seconds instead. I told the door to open for me and stepped inside to look at the wormhole.

That’s when Eobard saw me and whispered something. I didn’t hear him until he shouted a name at me that wasn’t mine: “Rose!”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Say what?” I blurted.

“It’s really you,” he was caught somewhere between shock and delight, “how…? No, I know how. Barry must’ve brought you here after he took you from me.”

I was suddenly all kinds of confused. “Why did you call me Rose?” I asked. “That’s not my name. I’m Mackenzie.”

Eobard didn’t answer me because the door opened to reveal Cisco Ramon and Joe West. I turned and looked at them. “Well,” I deadpanned. “This is awkward.”

“Who the hell are you?” Joe wanted to know.

“How did you get in here?” Cisco asked.

I answered Joe first. “I’m Mackenzie,” I said. I didn’t tell him my surname; he didn’t need to know who my husband was. “I got in here by telling the door to open for me.”

“She’s Rose,” Eobard corrected me as Cisco released him from his cell. I flailed one hand at him to shut him up.

“She’s a metahuman,” Joe deduced before he pointed his sidearm at me.

I considered magnetizing the gun and taking it from him, but decided that would send the wrong message. I stuck my hands up instead. “I’m not here to hurt anybody,” I told him. “Caitlin knows that. She’s known what I am for months. I gave her a blood sample and everything.”

Cisco gave me a wary glance before he texted Caitlin, who confirmed my identity. “So you’re subject zero,” he grinned at me despite everything that was going on that day, “every metahuman we’ve tested gets a number, but Caitlin never told me who subject zero was, said you were anonymous.”

Eobard watched me in his periphery while he set up the Time Sphere. “What powers did my accelerator give you, Rose?” he asked.

“Why does he keep calling you that?” Cisco wondered.

“Because that is who she was before she was taken from me,” Eobard told him while he put his yellow and black suit back on. “I fell in love with a woman named Rose once upon a time,” he explained, “she was my home. Barry—the future version of him that I knew—must’ve brought her back in time. I thought I had lost her and that’s why I hate him,” he took a step towards me, “that’s why I wanted him dead.”

“Rose was engaged to someone else,” I blurted without thinking about the implications of revealing what I knew because I had read the comics, “you killed her fiancée, then every dude she ever dated, and when she didn’t love you back, you traumatized her as a child, you rendered her mute and then she died institutionalized at a psychiatric hospital. Don’t tell me you loved her,” I scoffed, “that’s not how love works.”

Cisco looked horrified. “For real?”

“How do you know any of that if you’re not Rose?” Joe wanted to know.

“Ugh,” I muttered, “you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

Eobard turned and looked at the Time Sphere as if none of us had spoken. “It’s beautiful. Rip Hunter would be impressed,” he folded his arms behind his back, “he built the first one of these. Interesting man.” That’s when he offered a hand to me.

“No,” I said before he could ask me to go back to the future with him.

Eobard shrugged, wrongfully secure in his assumption that Barry was going to save his mother and so Rose would never be taken from him in the first place.

That’s when the wormhole spat out a winged helmet.

“What the hell is that?” Joe wondered as the metal clattered with a hollow sound over the floor of the pipeline.

Eobard made the bitchiest of bitchfaces when he looked at the helmet. “That’s my cue to leave,” he closed the distance between himself and Cisco and stood before him without touching. “Thank you, Cisco.”

Cisco, meanwhile, couldn’t look him in the eyes. “Don’t ever come back,” he said.

Eobard climbed into the Time Sphere. I felt it turn on and booped its interface with my brain, fascinated. That’s when Barry emerged from the wormhole and shattered the sphere. That was my cue to leave. I generated a dense magnetic field to shield me from the impact before I flailed the fuck out of the pipeline while Eobard was distracted by his rage at Barry for ruining his life all over again.

That’s when Caitlin and Ronnie came running to shut the wormhole down. “Mac?” Caitlin said.

“No time to say hello,” I quipped, “goodbye.”[8]

Caitlin and Ronnie ignored me because they had bigger fish to fry. I was halfway down the hallway when I heard the gunshot ring out. Eddie was dead, Eobard was ceasing to exist, the singularity was happening, and I was going to see my family again.

I shuffled outside into the parking lot and watched the paradox bloom over the building like deadly nightshade. I knew Len would see it too from wherever he was. I felt the energy churning within and reached for it. I opened a portal and it swallowed my scream the same way it swallowed me.

I ended up back on the floor of the same gender-neutral public bathroom I had left a year and a half ago in the Casey building. That wasn’t a shock. What shocked me was a knock on the door and what followed.

“Mackenzie?” said a voice I recognized as belonging to Catherine Howell, née Palladino, my best friend since high school. “Are you doing okay in there?”

That’s when I knew I had returned to Earth-33 at the exact moment I had left.

* * *

**Scene IV  
** Atonement

* * *

I must’ve used the singularity to open the same portal that had brought me to Arrowverse Earth-1, creating a causality loop in the process. I had done all this for nothing. Nobody had even known I was gone.

I had lost enough weight between working four days a week and fucking Len at least once a day to shrink from a size sixteen to a size twelve—still fat, but not as chubby as I had been at graduation. I’d gotten three new piercings in my ears, an industrial piercing in my left ear and tragus piercings in both ears. I had grown my hair out until it was halfway down my back. I’d trimmed it every month to avoid split ends, but it was still nearly a foot longer than it had been. That’s how fast my snake hair had always grown.

There was also the engagement ring and wedding band on my finger, the eight carat enhanced blue diamond conspicuous as fuck. I didn’t take my rings off. I decided to bite the bullet instead. This was what I had come for, after all.

I was glad I’d made a list of everything I brought with me to Arrowverse Earth-1, because I used it to pack for my return to Earth-33. I had my graduation cap and gown in my bag. I didn’t put it back on. I put my hair up and hoped the extra length wouldn’t be too obvious instead.

I closed my eyes and inhaled. There was no residual energy left in the gender-neutral public bathroom. I must’ve exhausted the portal somehow. I would have to open another one someplace else to get back where I belonged.

I opened my eyes and unlocked the door. “I’m okay,” I told Catherine as I shuffled into the atrium. I resisted the overwhelming urge to give her a hug. While it had been a year and a half for me, only a minute or two had passed for her.

I gnawed on the inside of my cheek to avoid bursting into tears when I saw my parents. We had lunch at the Red Robin a few blocks from the ferry terminal and I got stressed out enough to make the lights flicker. I was tempted to pretend nothing had changed, that I was going away to grad school in Vancouver instead of returning to a parallel universe where I was married to a supervillain. There was even a part of me that wanted to go to grad school for real.

That’s when I decided to bite the bullet. “Mom, Dad.” I swallowed thickly. “Sis, Kel, Cat. There’s something you should know. I may or may not have traveled to a parallel universe for a year and a half while I was in the bathroom earlier.”

Kel, short for Keller, was my younger brother, and he was named after Helen Keller, but I digress.

Here’s the thing: of course they didn’t believe me. I had anticipated that. That’s why I brought our marriage certificate, the polaroid from my first Christmas with Lester, my phone full of selfies from our vacation in the parallel versions of Poulsbo and Seattle, the photobooth strip of me and Bea from the beginning of our friendship, the video clip of surveillance footage I had used my powers to steal from the restaurant Bea and I saved from the Trickters’ shenanigans before I corrupted the storage drives attached to their camera feed, and glossy prints of my wedding pictures with Len and Lisa and Bea and Mick. I undid my hair and showed them my engagement ring and my wedding band and my new piercings. I even played the shaky videos I had made on my phone of Bea and Len introducing themselves to my family as proof.

I used my powers to pay off the student loans Catherine had left over from undergrad. I paid my parents back for my year and three quarters at community college before I transferred to SU, with interest. I overstuffed their retirement fund so I wouldn’t have to worry. Kel wasn’t going to take care of them when I was gone, but this way he wouldn’t have to. I gave my sister the money she needed to buy a house that wasn’t full of black mold lurking under terribad sheep wallpaper and more.

I let it all sink in over the silent ferry ride and long drive home in traffic while I ran my fingers through my hair and snacked on the sparks I generated.

“Mackenzie Elise Harper-Lowell,” my mom gave me the stinkeye in the rearview mirror. “That’s worse than biting your nails.”

“I prefer Mac,” I told her, “and my surname is Snart now.” That’s when I noticed her tears. “Mom,” my voice pitched higher with alarm because I cannot handle crying people, “please don’t cry.”

“I can believe parallel universes are real,” she wailed, “but I can’t believe you actually got married without me!”

That’s when I noticed both of my parents were crying. Kel didn’t seem to care, but then we never were close. It occurred to me that I was closer to Lisa now than my own brother. How sad was that?

I had broken the people I loved, shattered their worldview, turned everything topsy-turvy. How could I just leave them after that? How could I return to a reality where they didn’t exist?

“Don’t you have surgery tomorrow or something?” Kel asked.

I’d known that arthrodesis—a surgical procedure to wire my wrist joint and reduce, if not totally negate, the pain—would be the next step in my course of treatment for years, but I hadn’t wanted to do it until I finished undergrad.[9] I was planning to recover from the surgery over the summer, before I went to grad school. I completely forgot about it when I ended up on Arrowverse Earth-1.

Here’s the thing: I didn’t go into detail about the weeks I spent on Earth-33 because it hurt too much. I still ugly cried sometimes thinking about the looks on my parents’ faces when they realized I was leaving for good. I had become a different person; in many ways, I had grown up without them in the year and a half I spent in another world. That had broken something between us I had no idea how to fix.

I got into a plethora of arguments with both of my parents over the next week, but ultimately my mind was made up. I was torn up, but I wasn’t torn between worlds.

I bought every single DC anthology I could get my hands on that I didn’t already own, plus every season of the shows in the Arrowverse on Blu-Ray. I packed up my clothes—most of which I’d bought secondhand and couldn’t repurchase in another world—and miscellany. I ugly cried when I sorted through my library. I kept the books I hadn’t gotten duplicates of in the reality where I belonged and sold the rest to a used bookstore downtown for pennies on the dollar. I also packed the blankets my grandmother had crocheted for me and my owl patterned sheets and my handstitched stocking my other grandmother made for me. I even stole my favorite Christmas ornaments while my family was sleeping despite my hatred of the holiday.

“Are you happy there?” Kel asked me one night. “In your parallel universe?”

“Yeah,” I told him. “I am.”

“Cool.” Kel nodded and went back into the glorified basement where he lived.

There was cognitive dissonance again. I had thought I was done with that sort of shenanigans. Apparently not.

I loaded everything into my car, then drove it onto the bulkhead in our backyard facing Liberty Bay. I caused what must’ve been a statewide blackout to open another portal there and stabilize the wormhole long enough to drive into it.

I ended up in the parking lot at S. T. A. R. Labs, where I’d opened the portal that brought me back to Earth-33. I checked my location on my phone and whooped at the confirmation that I was indeed back in Central City.

That’s when I noticed it was November thirteenth. I had left on May nineteenth, so half a year had gone by here while I spent three weeks in another world.

“WHAT THE FUCK?” I yelled.

* * *

**Scene V  
** Apotheosis

* * *

I didn’t have a panic attack, but I did spiral into my anxiety for a minute there in the parking lot before I recollected myself. I wasn’t exactly sure where I was in season two of _The Flash_ , so I accessed the C. C. P. D. network with my brain to see if Len was in jail yet. Which he was. Apparently he was arrested that night and it was being processed right then and there. I calmed down and made a plan. Which began with me scheduling a conjugal visit for the next day because the idea of seeing Len again without being able to touch him was unacceptable. Technically it was a privilege he shouldn’t have had after one night in jail and consistently bad behavior, but I made it happen. I was surprised there was a conjugal visitation program at all, actually. Missouri didn’t have one in the reality where I grew up.

That’s when I realized he might’ve thought I had broken my promise and maybe he didn’t want to see me at all. I checked his list of personal effects and heaved a ginormous sigh of relief when I saw that his wedding ring was on it. Which meant he probably hadn’t given up on me. Crisis averted.

There was a camera feed in the room designated for conjugal visits. “Gross,” I muttered as I figured out how big the bed was and ordered a new mattress to be delivered the next day. I wasn’t taking any chances with my health. I drove to Wal-Mart and bought new sheets for similar reasons.

I called Lisa in the car and she accused me of not being who I said I was before she warned me never to call her again and hung up. I left a voicemail for Bea. I didn’t bother calling the special collections library. I had been declared missing and presumed dead after the singularity; the university would’ve filled my former position months ago. I reactivated my bank account with my brain and found Mick on my couch when I let myself into my house. I temporarily disabled the high-tech security system Len installed after he moved in with my powers because I assumed he’d changed the code in the past six months. I assumed wrong. Len didn’t change the code because he never gave up on me.

Anyhow.

Mick grinned at me. “You’re back!” he stood and wobbled before flopping back on my couch with a belch.

Of all the people I had met in this reality, Mick was the one I wanted to see the least. “You let my husband get snatched by his abusive father, who in turn put a bomb in my sister,” I retorted as I locked the door behind me. “You’re lucky I don’t electrocute people to death. You’re not my favorite person right now, Michael Rory Calhoun.”

Mick bristled at my knowledge of his full name. “Came over to apologize,” he muttered with a hint of remorse, “thought Snart’d be here.”

“Len is at Iron Heights,” I told him. “That’s going to be all over the news tomorrow with a headline like ‘Captain Cold Caught,’ probably. I’m going to visit him.” I heaved another sigh and plopped myself down beside him with the bottle of Dr. Pepper I’d gotten at Wal-Mart. “Do you know why Bea’s not answering her phone?” I asked.

Mick shrugged. “Bea went to visit her family in Rio last month,” he told me. “Wouldn’t let me go with her,” he belched again, “said I’d make a bad impression.”

“Yeah,” I deadpanned and sipped my soda, “I have no idea why she would’ve thought so.”

Mick grunted and spread out so I was banished to one corner of my own couch. I low-key zapped him until he quit occupying more space than he needed. “Will you tell Snart I’m sorry?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I yawned into the sleeve of my sweater. “I’ll tell him.”

That’s when he passed out and somehow ended up snoring like a freight train with his head in my lap. At least he didn’t vomit, I guess. I sat there and let him slumber until my thighs fell asleep too. I magnetized the goggles around his neck and lifted him gently so I could escape, then covered him with a blanket and went to bed. I slept better than I had during the weeks I spent on Earth-33 because I was in my bed again, but sleeping without Len felt empty.

I drove to Iron Heights first thing in the morning. Cisco had a vision of me coming through my portal when he arrived at S. T. A. R. Labs around the same time, but I didn’t know it then. I found the deliveryman arguing with Joe. I shuffled over and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Mackenzie Snart. We met briefly at S. T. A. R. Labs six months ago.”

“Did you just say your name was Snart?” Joe zeroed in on my surname. “As in Leonard Snart?”

“Yeah,” I nodded. “I’m his wife.”

Joe narrowed his eyes at me with equal parts recognition and suspicion. “I remember you,” he said, “you’re a metahuman. Do you really think I’m going to let you see the man you say is your husband?”

“I think you have to,” I told him. “We’ve been legally married since April thirtieth, months before his current incarceration, and I have a conjugal visit scheduled. I’ve also never been accused, let alone convicted, of any crime in this state or any other. I know my rights as the spouse of an inmate, detective.”

Joe made a frustrated noise. “What’s up with the mattress?” he wanted to know.

“I’m donating that mattress to Iron Heights because I’m betting you don’t clean the one you use for conjugal visits as often as you should. I’m immunocompromised, so I’m not taking any chances with my health.” I opened my bag to show him what I had inside. “I also brought clean sheets.”

Joe subjected me to a thorough search at the hands of Patty Spivot after I threatened to accuse the C. C. P. D. of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act if they wouldn’t let me have a new mattress and fresh bedclothes. I was so grateful it was Patty touching me instead of a male officer that I didn’t complain or attempt to make Joe uncomfortable by telling him what Len could do with my body cavities in explicit detail. I thought about it, though.

“Tell the scarlet speedster I need to speak with him after this,” I told him. “I have information regarding the multiverse.”

That’s when I shuffled out of the interrogation room and left him there to ponder the implications of what I had said. Patty showed me to the room where my new mattress had been set up after the deliveryman took the used mattress away. I was putting the sheets on when the door opened.

Len didn’t see me at first because he was closing the door behind him. I think he assumed I was part of his contingency plan instead of his wife. “I don’t care who you are or why you’re here,” he snarled, “don’t ever use my marriage as a cover story again.”

I ignored the hostility in his tone and raised my eyebrows at his jumpsuit instead. There was another weird moment of cognitive dissonance for me because seeing him that way reminded me of _Prison Break_ , except I wasn’t attracted to the actor who played Len when he was Michael Scofield in that series. That was less a multiversity thing and more a demisexuality thing. Still odd, though. “Well,” I said, “at least it’s not orange.”

Len recognized my voice. I saw it when his whole body froze before he turned and looked at me slowly, like he thought I might vanish again if he moved too fast. There was so much on his face, in the furrow of his eyebrows, the flare of his nostrils, the gape of his lips, the clench of his jaw, the intensity in his eyes.

Later he told me that he spent most of those six months I was gone pulling a job outside Central City because he hoped I’d be home when he came back. Then he got very drunk when I failed to appear. That’s why he let Barry take him to prison. Because he was starting to think I had broken my promise and with Lisa safe he had no reason to run.

“Hi.” I swallowed thickly and gnawed on the inside of my cheek, suddenly overwhelmed because I had literally given up the world for him and now he was standing so close and looking at me like he wanted to swallow me whole. “I missed you so much.”

That’s when he crossed the room and scooped me into his arms. I threw my own arms tight around his neck and practically climbed him like a tree. Len exhaled, his breath hot on my neck as he shuddered against me. “You’re real,” he said fervently, like he couldn’t believe his eyes until he touched me. “You came back to me.”

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “I only spent three weeks there. I didn’t know six months had passed here until last night. Oh! Mick was at our house when I got home,” I told him before I forgot, “he’s sorry too.”

Len snorted. “Sure he is,” he deadpanned. “So what’s the plan?”

“Well,” I flailed one hand at the mattress, “the plan is you fucking me into the mattress I bought specifically for this conjugal visit. That’s all I’ve got so far.”

Len sighed. “You’re not getting me out of here,” he deduced.

“Nope,” I said, “but only because I know it’s going to happen without me. All we have to do is wait for it.”

That’s when I killed the camera in the room and kissed him meticulously, showing how much I had missed him by licking into his mouth. Len gently set me down on top of the clean flannel covering the mattress and broke the kiss after he noticed my wrist had been immobilized. “Why is there a cast on your arm?” he asked, taking my forearm in both hands to examine the bright blue plaster, his eyes narrowed and lips thinned by worry.

“Yeah,” I stretched the vowel sound out awkwardly. “I totally forgot I had arthrodesis scheduled after graduation, so when I got back I decided to have the surgery because it’s supposed to mitigate pain. That’s one reason it took me three weeks to come back here. I was going to wait until I could have the cast removed, but I didn’t want to make you wait six weeks.” I huffed because I had made him wait six months instead. “That didn’t pan out, I guess.”

Len kissed the fingers of my arthritic hand. “So you’re not hurt,” he murmured.

I shook my head slowly. “Nope.”

“Good.” Len stood and took his jumpsuit off before he pulled the shirt he had on underneath over his head. I unhooked the belt around my waist, being dainty because doing so all at once would’ve hurt my wrist otherwise. It slithered onto the floor as I took off my dress and toed off my shoes. Len crouched and smoothed his hands over the curves from my belly to my ribcage. “Never seen these before,” he murmured as he looked at the bra and panties I had on.

“That’s because my underwear is literally out of this world,” I told him.

Len burst out laughing, a short and sweet gust working its way from his belly up into his throat. I loved that sound. I touched his face with my left hand and felt his jaw clench under my fingers when I generated a little spark in the hollow under the hinge of his jawbone. Len kissed me with so much urgency that our teeth clacked together and unhooked my bra with his hands instead of his teeth because his mouth was preoccupied with my lips. I squirmed when he palmed my breasts and flicked his thumbs over my nipples. Len moved his mouth to my neck and I knew he was going to leave a mark there, so I tilted my head to give him permission and felt him grin against my skin.

“Oh,” I blurted, “my dad called you a hoodlum when I told him what you do for a living. Also my mom said our marriage was doomed because she wasn’t at the ceremony. Let’s not adhere to that, okay?”

Len chuckled, delighted at the word choice my dad made, and pulled back to look at me. “So I’m a hoodlum now, hmm?” he asked.

“Yes,” I booped his nose. “Yes you are.”

Len kept teasing my nipples while he nuzzled and nipped my belly, then smoothed his hands from my breasts to my hips. I hissed when his thumb stroked my hipbone. Len tugged my panties down to see what provoked the pain noise and smirked up at me when he saw the new ink on my skin. “What’s this?”

“I got another tattoo,” I hedged.

“Mac,” Len smirked wider, “you’re the one who explained the etymology of my name to me. I know what this means.”

I told him once how Leonard originated from the French Léonard. Which in turn was rooted in the Old High German _lewo_ (“lion”) and _hart_ (“hard”). It literally meant “strong as a lion.” I also explained that my name came from the Scottish Gaelic _mac_ (“son of”) and _kenzie_ (“the intelligent one”), but that was neither here nor there. I was an etymology geek. Len knew me well enough to know about that, and to deduce what the tattoo meant.

I got a heraldic lion tattooed on my left hip. Yeah.

I blushed. “It’s your name,” I told him, “but classier.”

“Well,” Len cocked his head and grinned at me. “At least it’s not in Latin.”

Here’s the thing: I had two other tattoos. One was on the curve of my right shoulder. It read _sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc_. It meant, “we gladly feast on those who would subdue us.” It was the Addams family motto, but there’s another reason why I got that as my first tattoo. One was on the inside of my right wrist, currently obscured by my cast. It said _luceo non uro_ , the motto of clan Mackenzie. It meant “I shine, not burn.” Ironically, I got that before I became superconductive and started generating electricity.

I rolled my eyes at him. I knew he wasn’t knocking my Latin phrases to be mean. Len was a little bit dyslexic, so he wasn’t great at reading English, let alone a dead language. That’s one reason he didn’t bother to finish high school, actually: he thought he couldn’t show weakness, so he pretended to be too cool for school instead and punked out. That didn’t stop him from listening to audiobooks—books on tape and CD when he was younger and digital ones now—and he was shockingly well-read, pun unintended. After all, most of the classics were available as audiobooks, but I digress. “It’s still technically an open wound,” I told him, “so put your mouth somewhere that won’t hurt me.”

“Yes,” Len murmured in that low intimate voice that always made me shudder before he took my panties all the way off and buried his face between my legs, his tongue flicking into me for a taste before he focused on my clit to get me off hard and fast so he could feel the aftershocks of my orgasm when he fucked me.

I groaned at how slow he was going once his cock was inside me. “Len, fuck me harder, please...” I squirmed under him in a futile attempt to get more friction. “Len, we don’t have much _time_ —”

That’s when he kissed me hard and kept his mouth on mine to keep me quiet as he moved inside me. I tasted my own arousal on his lips and felt my cunt twitching from the sensation of his thick cock working me open. I stopped overthinking. That’s when my next orgasm hit me like a flash of lightning. I dug my fingers into his shoulder and my thumb generated a spark when it slipped over his collarbone. Len hissed and came inside me.

I saw flash burn marks from my fingertips on his shoulder when I opened my eyes. “I’m so sorry!” I yanked back my hand in horror. “That’s never happened before.”

Len took my hand in both of his and pressed my palm flat over his heart. “Do it again,” he said in a voice rendered hoarse and rough by all the sex.

“No!” I shook my head so fast my glasses slipped over the edge of my nose. I gently nudged them back into place with the fingers of my arthritic hand. “Not so close to your heart. I might kill you that way.”

“I trust you,” Len murmured.

“I _hurt_  you,” I retorted. “I don’t know if I trust me right now.”

That’s when someone banged on the door and gave us a five minute warning. Len heaved a sigh. “Time’s up,” he said through clenched teeth.

I sat up and he refastened my bra for me; I couldn’t do it myself—not without fastening the hooks in the front and shuffling the band around to the back, anyway—because of my cast, which pissed me off. Len kissed my shoulder after he pulled his underwear back on. “I’m going to visit you every day,” I told him. “I promise.”

Len heaved another sigh. “Mac,” he said my name softly, “you shouldn’t have to see me in chains.” I giggled. Len tensed while I buttoned my dress back up. “Is that funny to you?” he asked in his calmest voice.

I’d upset him. Whoops. “No,” I shook my head slowly. “I don’t care if you’re in chains. I know why you’re here,” I watched the blood from the wounds I’d given him stain the white t-shirt he wore under the jumpsuit, “because you killed your abusive father. I support that. I’m going to visit you every day so we can talk and I’m going to schedule one of these conjugal visits every week so we can fuck. Cool?”

Len grinned at me. “Cool,” he said. “Love you.”

“Love you too.” I kissed him again before I scooped my belt up off the floor and put it back on. That’s when I noticed something was missing. “Did you steal my panties?” I asked.

Len sighed and extracted them from the pocket of his jumpsuit, holding the scrap of silk and lace up with two fingers like an offering. I flopped onto the mattress and wiped his semen up off my cunt and thighs with tissues from my pocket before I put them on again. Len cupped my face in both hands and hunched to kiss me thoroughly after I got back on my feet and threw the tissues away, his mouth lingering on mine until the door swung open.

I shuffled into the hallway, where Patty was holding my cane—which they wouldn’t let me have in the room because it could be used as a weapon—and my purse. I had just secured my bag over my shoulder when I felt the Flash coming at me. I fought my first instinct to fight before he sped me out of the station and into S. T. A. R. Labs. At least he was kind enough to put me in a swivel chair.

Caitlin and Cisco were behind the desk. Martin Stein was passed out in another room, temporarily stabilized. Hunter Zolomon (posing as Jay Garrick) had returned to Earth-2; Harrison Wells hadn’t quite arrived on Earth-1. Barry Allen was right in front of me, the white and gold of his lightning bolt emblem standing out against the dark red of his suit.

“I heard you wanted to speak to me,” he said in that odd reverberating voice he used to disguise himself.

If this was still a TV show instead of my reality, there would’ve totally been a commercial break right there.

“Mac?” Caitlin whirled on Barry. “What is she doing here?”

“I know who you are, Barry Allen.” I yawned into the sleeve of my sweater. “So you don’t have to wear the mask.”

“Snart told you?” Cisco asked while Barry removed his mask.

“Snart?” Caitlin looked at me.

I shook my head slowly. “I’m fulgurkinetic,” I told him. “I can sense the electricity you generate when you run. Also the lightning inside of you. I would’ve known who you are even if I weren’t from a parallel universe where you were all fictional characters on a TV show adapted from a series of comics—”

Cisco held up his hands to stop me, his eyes going comically wide at the implications of that. “Say what?”

“Yeah,” I deadpanned. “That’s a thing.” I let it sink in for them while I kept talking. “This is the offscreen space between episodes three and four of season two. I watched the whole season in the reality from whence I came. Also, I’m basically a more stable version of Farooq Gibran, whom you codenamed Blackout. I’m not here to steal your powers,” I clarified when Barry exchanged a wary look with Cisco and Caitlin, “I’m here to help you stop the big bad Zoom.”

“Joe said you’re married to Snart,” Barry retorted. “Why the hell would you want to help us?”

I shrugged. “I was planning on meddling with canon during the events of season one,” I explained, “but then I needed the singularity to be a thing so I could go back to Earth-33 and I didn’t want to risk altering events so that never happened. I’m not planning on going back to Earth-33 again, so I can pretty much do whatever I want in season two.”

“Are you for real?” Barry folded his arms. “Look, you can’t seriously expect us to believe what you’re saying right now without proof.”

I was a little bit hurt by how openly hostile the whole team was toward me; even Caitlin, whose stricken expression when she realized I really was married to Captain Cold hit me like a metaphorical sucker punch. I loved them. I had loved them before they were real to me. I understood why they didn’t like me or trust me right away. That didn’t make it hurt any less.

“There’s a portal to Earth-2 in your basement,” I retorted, “and if you would’ve let me drive myself here, I would’ve shown you what I brought with me as proof.” I decided to bite the bullet and offered him my keys. “It’s all in the passenger seat of my car,” I told him, “go and see for yourself.”

Barry sped off with my keys to Iron Heights. Caitlin glared at me from behind the desk. Cisco wasn’t glowering, but he did look shocked, no pun intended.

I sighed. “Do you remember what Eobard said before the singularity became a thing?” I asked.

Cisco nodded. “Wells called her Rose,” he explained to Caitlin, “said he loved her in the future and he wanted to kill Barry for taking her from him.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I thought about that copiously while I was recovering from surgery on Earth-33,” I showed them my cast, “and I came up with a theory or three. Bertrand Russell wrote that ‘the law of causation, according to which later events can theoretically be predicted by means of earlier events, has often been held to be _a priori_ , a necessity of thought, a category without which science would not be possible.’[10] I’m the reason Eobard wanted to erase Barry from existence. I’m also the reason this alternate timeline exists. It’s not my fault, exactly, because Eobard made the choices that shaped this version of reality while I was growing up thinking you were all fictional characters, but I’m not just a part of this world. I’m literally its _raison d’être_ , its reason for being. I’m here to help you because I want to be part of something. I want to be part of this. I know you don’t trust me, and that’s okay. I plan on changing your minds once you get to know me for real. I also think being a speed force conduit solves the problem of microscopic time reversibility postulated by Loschmidt’s paradox, which is how Barry achieves spacetime travel, by reducing entropy through internal quantum transitions between colliding atoms—”

That’s when Barry sped back into the cortex with my copy of _The DC Comics Encyclopedia_ and season one of _The Flash_ on Blu-Ray.

“Oh my god,” Cisco intoned as he reached for my encyclopedia and flipped through it.

Barry snatched the encyclopedia from Cisco in a flash. “No spoilers!”

“I have so many comics,” I told Cisco, “if you want to borrow them. I think it’s safe to assume there won’t be spoilers because the show is totally different from the comics. That’s why Arrowverse Earth-1 doesn’t exist in the same multiverse as Earth-0 or Earth-1 in the New-52. At least I don’t think it does. I actually brought you this,” I pulled my copy of _The Multiversity_ out of my purse and removed the fake dust jacket from atop the real one before I offered it to Cisco. “I thought you’d like it.”

“This doesn’t prove anything,” Barry snapped.

“Seriously?” Cisco flailed his hand at the boxed set. “That’s a TV show about us from a parallel universe, dude! That proves we’re awesome!”

I giggled. I couldn’t help it! Cisco was totally my favorite. “I know you heard what I said to Caitlin and Cisco,” I told him. I had felt him speed down the hallway before I decided speechifying was the way to go. “I’m not here because of who my husband is. I’m here because I wouldn’t be who I am without you.”

“So you’re here because you think you owe me something,” Barry said.

I scoffed. “I’m not my husband,” I retorted. “I owe you nothing. I’m here because I can help you. Also,” I shrugged and stretched the long _o_ sound out awkwardly. “I’m unemployed and my husband is in jail. It’s not like I have anything better to do at the moment.”

Barry laughed despite himself. I grinned. That was progress.

“Why don’t you just use your abilities to break your husband out of Iron Heights?” Caitlin asked.

I shrugged. “I’m trying to embody my belief that metahumans aren’t evil by nature,” I told her. “I know you don’t think you think we’re all evil, but every single metahuman you encounter who isn’t Barry ends up a corpse, a fugitive, or a prisoner.” I looked at Cisco and held his gaze while I spoke. “It’s enough to make someone close to you avoid telling you they might be a metahuman for months because they’re scared of being rejected by their best friends. That’s why I didn’t tell Len what I was until we’d been dating for half a year.”

Cisco exhaled audibly, beyond pleased that I didn’t call him on his vibes in front of Caitlin.

Caitlin narrowed her eyes at me. “So you were already with Snart when we met,” she deduced. “Is that why you wouldn’t let me run tests on you in person?”

I shook my head slowly. “Eobard kept Farooq’s corpse in the pipeline because he wanted to replicate his ability to disempower Barry. I didn’t want to end up being used for parts. If you want to run tests now that Eobard has ceased to exist, I will submit to your battery.”

“Oh!” Caitlin giggled, “a battery of tests. That’s funny.”

I smiled tentatively at her. I used to resent how adorable I apparently was, but lately I’d begun to see it as a legit advantage. Apparently it’s difficult to hate a chubby bespectacled librarian who cracked jokes and needed a cane to walk, because a woman who may or may not become a walking endothermic reaction someday warmed up to me pretty fast.

I let them run tests on me while Martin was asleep. I let Caitlin give me a lumbar puncture to draw cerebrospinal fluid in addition to blood. Caitlin said it was necessary because the brain runs on electrical impulses and my superconductivity might’ve somehow altered the functionality of my nervous system. I had a brain scan for similar reasons. I laid face down in the bed for hours afterward to reduce the possibility of getting a headache in the aftermath. I got migraines and those weren’t fun times. I didn’t want to risk it.

Cisco eventually came to visit me once Caitlin was gone. “Thanks,” he said.

“For what?” I squinted at him over the crook of my left elbow before I put my glasses back on.

“For not telling anybody that I’m…” he twisted his fingers together in a futile attempt to diffuse his nervous energy.

“Like me?” I generated sparks between my knuckles and wiggled my fingers at him.

“Yeah,” Cisco mumbled. “Like you.”

“And Barry,” I reminded him gently.

Cisco nodded more to himself than me. “And Barry.”

“It gets better,” I told him. “Cisco, you’re a hero, okay? That’s not a spoiler,” I smiled and reached out to boop his nose. “It’s the unslanted truth.”

Cisco gave me a wide grin, showcasing the adorable gaps between his teeth. “Thanks, Mrs. Cold.”

I pointed at him imperiously. “That is not my codename,” I told him. “I wanted you to help me pick one, actually. I was thinking Voltage, or Galvanism.”

“I really like Galvanism,” Cisco bobbed his head enthusiastically, “but Voltage is pithier.”

“See!” I giggled. “That’s what I thought! I also thought maybe Solenoid—”

Cisco flailed. “Because the helical coil of a solenoid creates a magnetic field when electric currents pass through it!” he blurted.

I nodded and generated static when my hair brushed over the cast on my forearm. “I cannot pick,” I told him forlornly.

“All three of those are good,” Cisco told me. “No one else is good at the names.” At that, he offered me a fistbump. I pressed my knuckles against his own and we blew it up in the aftermath.

That’s when Barry returned. “I drove your car here from Iron Heights,” he told me. “I left it out in the parking lot for you.”

“Thank you.” I looked over my shoulder at the fastest man alive before I turned back to Cisco. “Don’t you have a device meant to detect evidence of interdimensional travel?” I asked him. “If you need further proof, use it on my car. I drove it through a portal to get back to this reality.”

Barry handed over my keys and practically dragged Cisco out of the room, probably to lecture him on fraternizing with the spouse of the enemy. I put my clothes back on and shuffled into the elevator. I called Bea again when I got home and left her another voicemail. Lisa didn’t respond to my texts or calls. I sighed and went to bed with a book for company.

That’s one reason I liked stories better than people—when I was reading, I never felt alone.

* * *

I hated seeing Len every day without being able to touch him. I knew Joe and Barry were listening to our conversations—all of the phones were tapped in case the prisoners and their visitors were in cahoots—but I didn’t care. I had nothing more to hide.

Len noticed I kept wincing over the phone. “What’s wrong, hmm?” he asked.

“Caitlin gave me a lumbar puncture the other day,” I told him, “on the bright side, I don’t have meningitis or encephalitis. I do have oodles of immunoglobulins in my cerebrospinal fluid. I think my IgG and IgM antibodies increased because I’m immunocompromised, though, so. That’s normal for me.”

“So you’re healthy,” Len deduced. “Good.”

“Yeah,” I shrugged. “I’m a very healthy person with an autoimmune disease. That’s not oxymoronic or anything. Nope.”

Len chuckled and I blushed. That sound did things to me, okay? It was embarrassing as fuck. “I miss you,” he told me.

“I miss you too,” I said. “I love you. Don’t let anyone punch you in the face.”

Len had broken the bony pyramid of his nose more than once. I knew his father was to blame for at least one time, if not more; I didn’t want him to break it again if he could help it.

“I’m in the metahuman wing for some reason,” Len told me, “and I have my own cell. I don’t get close enough to my fellow inmates to get into fights.”

“Good,” I retorted. “Let’s keep it that way.”

Len smirked at me. “Yes, Mrs. Snart.”

I blushed harder. “Rude,” I huffed.

“I love you too,” Len told me before the guards took him away.

I hung up the phone and shuffled off to get a soda. I drank the occasional mocha, but I liked my caffeine cold. Which was apparently how I liked my men also, pun intended. I was going to hang out at S. T. A. R. Labs so I could meet the new and improved Firestorm before Martin and Jax left for Pittsburgh, but then I heard the alarms begin to shriek. I accessed the security camera feeds with my brain and used my powers to open the doors into the restricted hallway once I saw a tiny girl whose dark hair was clumped with ice crystals headed for Len.

I shuffled around the corner and generated a wad of electricity that zapped her on the shoulder hard enough to knock her down.

That’s when Joe came running from the other end of the hallway. “What the hell?” he yelled at me.

I shrugged and tucked my cane in the crook of my elbow so I could stick my hands up in the process. “I have no idea who this is,” I told him as I shifted my weight off my bad ankle. “Len, is she your contingency plan?” I asked.

Len shook his head. “Never seen her before,” he told me.

“Don’t call the Flash,” I told Joe, “he’s got enough on his plate with the whole Firestorm debacle going on right now.”

Joe nodded. Barry must’ve explained the whole combustible situation to him at some point. “I don’t trust you,” he told me.

“That’s okay,” I retorted. “I don’t expect you to. I’d rather earn it, anyway.”

It turned out that our tiny cryokinetic girl was Louise Lincoln, the second villainess with that name from the comics.[11] Crystal Frost was Killer Frost pre-Crisis, Louise Lincoln was Killer Frost post-Crisis and pre-reboot, and Caitlin Snow was Killer Frost post-reboot. I convinced Joe to let me talk to her. That’s how I learned this version of Louise was Len and Lisa’s baby sister.

Louise’s mother—who never married Lewis Snart—had died of pancreatic cancer two months earlier. Lewis had tracked her down after she lost her scholarship to Hudson—because dealing with her dead mom caused her grades to slip, understandably—and offered her tuition money in exchange for help pulling a job. Louise was another part of his plan B on the diamond heist, in case Len somehow failed to get past the laser grid; but with Lewis dead, she couldn’t pay her tuition or cover the costs of a funeral service for her mother.

“She’s nineteen,” Joe told me after he confirmed her story. “That means I can arrest her and put her in the metahuman wing along with her brother—”

“No,” I said. “She lost her mom and her future in one fell swoop. She was desperate. Lewis used her. She needs help, not jail.”

“She’s a Snart,” Joe protested.

“Yeah,” I retorted. “So am I. She’s my problem, not yours. She didn’t hurt anyone—”

“Yet,” Joe said.

“Okay,” I huffed, “do you seriously want to charge a nineteen year old girl whose mom died of cancer six weeks ago with a class B felony and put her in prison for a decade because of who her dad was?”

I knew burglary was a class C felony in Missouri, but Louise had broken into the metahuman wing of a maximum security prison. If she ended up in court, she would be charged with a class B felony instead because of where she decided to burgle. That meant she would be sentenced to between five and fifteen years in prison for coping badly with the anger step of her grieving process. That was unacceptable.

Joe made a frustrated noise. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t.”

“I’ve got money,” I told him. “It’s not from Len stealing things. It’s my own totally legal cash money. I will pay her tuition and cover the costs of the funeral for her mom. Let me help her,” I looked him in the eyes and hoped my hardest that he could see I was totally sincere about this, “please.”

That’s how I adopted Louise Lincoln. I took her to Big Belly Burger and wondered if she would freeze her food solid, or whether her powers were stable when it came to warmth, like her counterpart from the comics.

“So you’re married to my brother,” she said between fries. “There must be something wrong with you.”

I gave her a pointed look. “Besides the whole metahuman thing?” I asked. Louise nodded. “I’m from a parallel universe where everyone who exists here is a fictional character,” I told her.

I expected her to assume I was joking. Instead she gave me a speculative looked and shrugged. “That’s like a self-insert fic,” Louise deadpanned with her mouth full, so her chewing ruined her attempt to be snarky.

“Yeah,” I nodded again. “That’s exactly what it’s like.”

I had wanted more ladies on _The Flash_ , once upon a time. There was a lesson here, and it was be careful what you wish for because you might get a cryokinetic baby sister, I guess.

* * *

I decided the Snart siblings must’ve inherited their _quid pro quo_ attitude from Lewis—good riddance—because Louise refused to accept blank checks for tuition and funeral stuff without promising to return the favor. I told her that she didn’t owe me anything. Louise narrowed her eyes at me behind her glasses, the irises a shade of ice blue rendered incongruous by her brown skin and black hair. Lulu Lincoln—her mom—was from Abu Dhabi, and she was a widow before she met Lewis, which was probably the reason they never got married. Also why a half-Arab girl wound up with a super white surname like Lincoln.

Anyhow.

Louise went to Hudson to solve her tuition problem. I called Lisa again on my way to S. T. A. R. Labs and left a voicemail. “I get that you’re pissed at me,” I told her. “I left without saying goodbye to you. I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry, okay? I’m so sorry, but this isn’t about us. Lisa, you have another sister. Louise Lincoln is her name, she’s nineteen years old, and her mom died six weeks ago, so we’re all the family she’s got. I thought you should know.” That said, I hung up and parked in a handicapped space at S. T. A. R. Labs.

Cisco told me that he got the idea to put a temporarily stable power source for Martin in a cane from me. That’s how I met Martin, who told me to call him “Professor.” I arrived just in time for Barry to speed into the cortex with blood samples from Jefferson Jackson[12] and Henry Hewitt[13] that he took without their permission. I didn’t comment on that because Martin’s life was on the line, but I did side-eye the fuck out of everyone in the cortex who condoned that malarkey.

“At least you have upward mobility now,” I deadpanned. “Also you can tell people to get off your lawn.”

I made him laugh, which made Caitlin smile at me. That was progress.

I knew the version of Harrison Wells from Earth-2 was skulking around the building. I neglected to mention that while I was hanging out with Cisco because he was stressing out about the power source to stabilize the Firestorm matrix. I was grabbing dinner when Martin and Hewitt attempted the merge and failed epically. Harry burgled the Applied Sciences department at Mercury Labs that night. Jax came to S. T. A. R. Labs the next morning and refused to merge with Martin when Caitlin asked him to before he stormed out.

“He said no to being a superhero!” Caitlin was shaking like she wanted to oscillate right out of her skin. “Who does that?” I raised my right hand awkwardly. Caitlin ignored me. “I mean, you didn’t say no when you had the chance. Cisco, would you?”

“…a chance to have superpowers?” Cisco started nervously messing with his hair and exhaled a shaky chortle, “ha ha, sign me up.”

“Look,” Barry said, “we’re asking Jax to change his entire life, to sacrifice what he does have. I mean, that’s not a decision that can be made lightly. It took me a long time to figure out this whole hero thing.”

“Exactly,” Caitlin nodded more to herself than him. “Which is why we need someone who wants to do this.”

Caitlin left to get Hewitt back. Barry sped off to work at the C. C. P. D. headquarters. I went to visit Len at Iron Heights again before I got lunch with Cisco, who decided we should hang out because I was keeping his secret. I figured he was attempting to keep his friends close and his enemies closer, but I could tell he genuinely liked me as a person too.

We talked about TV shows, mostly. I told Cisco about my issues with _The Walking Dead_ , especially their decision to leave the Governor alive in the aftermath of season three so he could wreak havoc in season four. I got it from a narrative perspective, but it made no sense in-universe for Rick Grimes to let that guy live. Fight me. Cisco was pissed about how Glenn had apparently died. I told him I stopped watching after Beth was shot, but I knew Glenn had survived because Cat kept watching after I ragequit the show. Yeah.

I caught a mild strain of influenza that lasted twenty-four hours that night. Martin and Jax left to train in Pittsburgh the next day while I groggily texted Louise and told her to visit Len at Iron Heights for me because I was busy worshipping the porcelain gods. I watched them stare each other down before they finally started talking on the camera feed at the prison. I didn’t access the tapped phone line to hear their conversation because I knew Len would tell me how it went between them later. I figured he told her to come over and take care of me in his stead, because we ended up watching _Lost in Austen_ [14] on my sofa while Harry saved Barry from the Earth-2 version of King Shark.[15]

I had another conjugal visit scheduled the day we met the version of Harrison Wells from Earth-2. Cisco and Caitlin stood with their arms folded and their bodies tense as he flipped through his erroneous autobiography. Ironically, my issues with Eobard had been mitigated by the causality loop that created this alternate timeline; I knew what horrible things he’d done to me, but only because I had read the story in a comic book a long time ago in a reality far, far away. Eobard hadn’t looked like Harry when he destroyed the previous version of me, either.

“Dr. Caitlin Snow, Cisco Ramon, Mackenzie Snart,” Barry said, “meet Dr. Harrison Wells from Earth-2.”

“Hi,” Cisco muttered in the most awkward tone I had ever heard.

“Hi,” said Harry.

Caitlin and Cisco both twitched when he spoke. Here there were oodles of cognitive dissonance. It was strange to see that happening to other people.

“So,” Cisco unfolded one of his arms to point at Harry, “let me get this straight. You’re the doppelganger of the man who murdered his mom, is responsible for both Ronnie and Eddie’s deaths, and who basically ruined all our lives because a past and future version of her broke his heart.”

Harry looked at me. I waved awkwardly, my cast impeding my fingers so they snarled like claws halfway into the motion.

“Yeah,” Caitlin spoke fast because she wasn’t bothering to filter the words flowing between her brain and her mouth, “but he’s not even the doppelganger of the Dr. Wells that we knew, because that Dr. Wells’ body had been taken over by the Reverse-Flash, who was really Eobard Thawne and Eddie’s distant relative from the future.”

Harry made the bitchiest of bitchfaces at all of the exposition. “Yeah, I didn’t follow any of that. I’m my own man. I had nothing to do with the murder of your mother or your friend Ricky—”

“His name was Ronnie,” Caitlin said indignantly. Cisco kept pointing at him. I was glad I hadn’t told him that his comic book counterpart was capable of causing seismic catastrophes because if I had, then he might’ve given Harry a literal shakedown.

“Him either,” Harry retorted.

Barry asked Harry for proof of his identity; Harry gave him the purse that Martin had thrown into the breach while Caitlin protested because it belonged to her.

“I want to run some tests on you,” Caitlin told him.

“I’ll be genetically indistinguishable from my Earth-1 counterpart,” Harry told her, “your tests will reveal nothing.”

“Great,” Caitlin bit down on the consonant at the end of the word.

“Yeah,” I stretched the short _a_ sound out while he turned and looked at me, “Caitlin will still run them anyway.”

Harry was still watching me when he told her, “be my guest.”

“Why are we even listening to him?” Cisco wanted to know. “How do we know he’s not evil like the other guy?”

“He saved my life last night,” Barry told us, “the question is, why? I’m guessing that you didn’t travel between dimensions just to meet the Flash.”

“That’s exactly what I did,” Harry retorted. “I came here to help you, Barry, to stop your greatest enemy.”

“He already did that,” Cisco pointed out.

“I’m not talking about Reverse-Flash,” Harry said derisively, “I’m talking about Zoom.”

Barry side-eyed me. “There’s a lot of that going around.”

Harry noticed Caitlin nodding more to herself than anyone else. “I see you’ve already heard of him.”

“Yeah,” Barry said, “Zoom has been sending metahumans from your world through the breaches to fight me.”

“Well,” Harry said, “they’re the symptoms. Zoom’s the plague, one that’s infected my world, and now he’s coming for yours.”

I scoffed. Harry narrowed his eyes at me.

“What do you know about Zoom?” Barry asked.

“Everything,” Harry replied before he took off the rig for the gun he stole from Mercury Labs. “I created Zoom. I’m responsible for all the Earth-2 metahumans, a fact I’ve ignored for far too long, but now I’m doing something about it.”

“Yeah, well,” said Cisco, “we’re batting a thousand against these breachers.”

“You’re batting a thousand, Crisco?” Harry said in the same derisive tone. “What’s your sample size? Ten? Less?”

“Three,” I told him. “All dead, unless you didn’t shoot to kill the giant anthropomorphic shark last night.”

“A. R. G. U. S. took King Shark,” Cisco told me, “he was alive when their crew showed up. I have no idea what they did with him, though.”

I had an idea, but it wasn’t a good one. I shook it off. “Cool,” I said.

Barry side-eyed me because he knew how A. R. G. U. S. treated rogue metahumans and it was totally uncool.

“I mean awful,” I told him.

Barry nodded, mollified, and shifted his focus back to the other person from a parallel universe in the cortex.

Harry acknowledged the information I had given him with another nod. “Zoom is obsessed with speed,” he explained in a voice that somehow managed to sound more patronizing than before. “He will never allow there to be another speedster in the multiverse. He’s going to keep sending these metas here, one after the next, all with the same goal—to kill the Flash—unless we stop him together.”

“Last time we listened to a guy with your face, some bad things went down.” Cisco muttered.

Caitlin nodded. “We lost people we cared about,” she told him softly.

“Everyone loses someone they care about, Snow,” Harry retorted, “the real test of character is what you do once they’re gone.”

I fought the urge to wiggle my fingers at the foreshadowing. That’s when Joe walked in and shots were fired. I magnetized the bullets to stop them from hitting their intended target in midair.

“Joe!” Barry yelled and yanked the bullets out of thin air in case my paramagnetism had only thrown off their groove until I let them go, “put the gun down!”

“How is he still alive?” Joe shouted at Harry as Barry held him back. “How are you still alive?”

“I don’t know,” Harry snarled, “because you missed?”

“Actually,” I muffled a yawn in my sleeve, “I used paramagnetism to stop the bullets. It was super effective!”

Cisco offered me a covert fistbump because he got my reference and we blew it up in the aftermath.

“Hey,” Barry snapped back, “I’m trying to keep him from shooting you and you’re not helping!” Joe stopped fighting to get at Harry, but he was still glaring daggers—or more bullets—at him. “Let’s go take a walk,” Barry suggested before he led his dad out into the hall. “It’s all good.”

Caitlin told Cisco and me to be careful before she went to fetch Jay from Earth-2; she gently squeezed my shoulder on her way out. That one small touch meant so much to me. It was the same thing she had done to Cisco, her best friend in the multiverse. It had to mean we were becoming friends too.

“I don’t suppose you have a Big Belly Burger in this universe, do you?” Harry asked.

“This isn’t happening,” Cisco muttered before he left the room.

“I’ll take you,” I told Harry as I used my cane to get back on my feet, “but you’re buying.”

Harry nodded. “Well, you did save my life,” he said, “the least I can do is buy you lunch.”

“So,” I said after we’d gotten lunch to go, “in the comics Jesse Belle Chambers is the daughter of Libby Lawrence and a speedster named Johnny Chambers. I’m guessing Libby Lawrence doesn’t exist on Arrowverse Earth-2 since your daughter is Jesse Chambers Wells. So are you married to Johnny Chambers, or are both of you in a polyamorous relatoinship with Libby Lawrence? Is Johnny Chambers a lady named Joan or Jeanne on Arrowverse Earth-2, or is Tess Morgan her mom because fuck the source material?”[16]

“Yeah,” Harry said, “I didn’t follow any of that.”

“I’m from Earth-33,” I told him, “which is a parallel universe where this is a TV show based on a series of comics. That’s how I know who your daughter is. I also know that Zoom is holding her hostage. That’s why I offered to get lunch with you,” I explained. “I’m fulgurkinetic and therefore ostensibly capable of disempowering Zoom. If not permanently, then maybe long enough to rescue Jesse.”

Harry was quiet for a long time. “Why would you risk your life for my daughter?” he asked.

“Because any storyline where a teenage girl is kept in a cage to give her father manpain is not going to happen on my watch,” I deadpanned. “Also, my long-lost sister-by-marriage is nineteen too and she needs a friend like Jesse right now. Assuming they get along when I get her back for you.”

Harry kept looking at me speculatively while I drove us back to S. T. A. R. Labs and sang along off-key to “Boom Clap,” except I said _the sound of my thighs_ instead of _the sound of my heart_ during the chorus. [17] Because thunder thighs. That pun totally worked if you were fulgurkinetic, okay? Don’t judge me.

I dropped Harry off at S. T. A. R. Labs and went to Iron Heights for my conjugal visit. I made certain there were clean sheets on the mattress I had donated a few weeks earlier while I waited. I shuffled over to give Len a hug once he was in the room and they’d shut the door behind him.

“Don’t try and merge your DNA with the cold gun to get cryokinetic superpowers for yourself,” I booped his nose in warning, “you get bone cancer and die when you do that in the comics.”18

“Noted,” Len murmured before he cupped my face and hunched to kiss me hard. I made a sharp little noise in the back of my throat and sucked on his tongue after he licked into my mouth. Len broke the kiss to nip my jaw before he moved his lips to my neck.

“There’s a thing I want to do,” I told him when he scraped his teeth over my pulse and my knees buckled.

“Sure.” Len quit kissing me and took off my shirt for me before he unzipped my skirt and it dropped into a puddle of fabric on the floor. “Whatever you want, Mac.”

“Okay,” I felt my cheeks flush because I was about to suggest a thing we’d never done before. Len had done it, of course, but never with me. That was about to change.

I wanted to try simultaneous oral sex. Len ended up naked on his back while I straddled him with my knees on either side of his chest and sucked his cock; he wasn’t returning the favor because he was busy looking at me. I could feel the weight of his eyes and it made me squirm. I hadn’t known if this position would work for us because he was so much taller than me, but then he spread my ass apart with his hands and lifted my hips to drag the flat of his tongue over my clit. I moaned around his cock and sucked him harder, swallowing as much of him as I could as I hollowed out my cheeks and curled my tongue along his shaft. Len flicked his tongue over my slit and sucked on my slick folds until my cunt was twitching and my hips shook, then he slipped one of his long fingers inside me and licked a long wet line along my perineum. I didn’t expect him to keep going and lick my asshole, but he did. I squawked in shock and generated a spark in my throat, jolting with his cock still inside my mouth. Len worked his tongue into my ass while he fucked me with his fingers and rubbed my clit roughly with his thumb. I felt my asshole clench up when I came so hard my hips bucked. I whimpered and let his cock slide out of my mouth because I needed to breathe through the aftermath of my orgasm.

Here’s the thing: I had issues with anal. There was a high risk of infection involved with anal sex I didn’t want to take. I also had a colonoscopy once and drinking laxative all day while I crapped out everything in my gastrointestinal tract was enough to turn me off anal forever.

“I am not letting you fuck me in the ass,” I told him once I could use my words.

Len sighed and slipped his fingers out of me with a slick wet sound. “Wasn’t asking you to,” he told me flatly.

I moved to sit beside him so I could look at his face while we talked because having a conversation about butt stuff with my ass right in front of his face would’ve made this even more awkward. “I told you I don’t do butt stuff,” I retorted, “and that was totally butt stuff. I call party foul.”

“Did you like it?” Len asked even though he knew the answer.

I couldn’t lie to him; he knew me too well. “Yes,” I told him.

Len propped himself up on his elbows and smirked at me. “Yes, what? Be specific, Mac.”

“Yes, Len, I liked it when you…” I blushed and exhaled sharply, “…when you licked my asshole. Doesn’t mean I want your cock or your fingers in there.” I shuddered in the worst way. I had a bad experience involving my own fingers in my ass once; not from a sex thing, but from a bowel movement gone horribly wrong. It hurt to work myself open there, and I couldn’t take a dump normally for days. There was blood. It wasn’t fun. Again, it was enough to turn me off anal forever. “Cool?” I asked.

Len reached for me and pulled me back on top of him. “Cool,” he said in that low, intimate voice before he kissed me again. I got a little squeamish during the kiss, but he didn’t taste bad, so that was okay. I was also meticulous about hygiene. I had to be or I’d get sick more than I did, which was far too often. I knew my butt was clean. It was still a little bit weird to kiss him after his tongue had been in there. Len broke the kiss and pressed his forehead against mine. “Relax,” he murmured as he smoothed one hand along my spine. “I want to feel you come again on my cock. I know you won’t be able to come at all unless you calm down, hmm?”

I could feel his cock still hard against my belly, sticky from his precome and my saliva. I lifted my hips and slipped the arm that wasn’t in a cast between us. Len clenched his jaw when I wrapped my hand around him. I swirled my charged thumb back and forth over the head of his cock and teased him until his hips bucked under me. Len grinned when I straddled him again. I shifted my hips until he slipped inside me and moved up and down along the length of his thick cock while he sat up and held me tight so my breasts squished against his chest. Len nuzzled my neck before he kissed me again, the fingers of one hand tangling in my hair while he grabbed my ass with the other and thrust up into my slick heat. I did come on his cock after that because he angled his thrusts to hit my g-spot until he lost control and fucked me quick and dirty. I missed him even while he was inside me because the sex was awesome, but it wasn’t enough.

I knew we only had a few weeks left before _Legends of Tomorrow_ became a thing. I could wait that long, couldn’t I?

(Wait for it.)

* * *

I went to pick Barry up from the bank where he got blinded by the Earth-2 version of Linda Park because I figured he couldn’t run back to S. T. A. R. Labs if he couldn’t see. I drove him there instead.

“Thank you,” Barry said in a disgruntled tone while he sat in my passenger seat and tried to adjust to his temporary blindness.

“Okay,” I huffed. “I know you have bigger problems than my hurt feelings right now, but seriously? I heard you say you always knew there was good in Len when you visited him at Iron Heights after you put him away. Did it ever occur to you that I might be one reason for that?” Lisa was another reason, obviously, but I digress.

Barry heaved a sigh. “Look,” he said, “I’ve got a lot going on right now and I have no idea who I can trust between you and Wells and the Earth-2 doppelganger of my ex-girlfriend who just blinded me with science.”

“Did she fail you in geometry and hit you with technology?” I deadpanned.19

Barry laughed despite himself. “Mac, you seem awesome,” he said, “and we could really use someone with abilities like yours on the team. I’m trying so hard not to let your husband screwing us over six months ago influence how I feel about you.”

“Well,” I shrugged even though I knew he couldn’t see me, “maybe you wouldn’t get screwed over by supervillains if you didn’t imprison other metahumans in your basement without fresh clothes or bathroom facilities or, y’know, a trial. That’s rudimentary bad karma, dude.”

“Those metahumans were bad guys!” Barry protested.

“So that means they deserve to wear the same clothes for months and do their business in a bucket or whatever?” I retorted. “I get that you planned to rehabilitate them before shit got real and I know you have the best intentions, but sometimes the road to hell really is paved that way. I’m technically a criminal too because I used my powers to set up a fake identity so I could live in this world. So do I belong in the pipeline?” I parked in a handicapped space and pulled my parking brake to punctuate the question.

“No,” Barry told me softly. “No, you don’t.”

“Thank you.” I got out of the car and looped my arm through his to lead him inside the building. “That’s all I’m saying. I could’ve taken your powers or helped Len steal things or gotten a taste for electrocuting people to death,” I pressed the down button on the elevator because the cortex was belowground, “but I didn’t. I want to help you instead.”

“Mac,” Barry laughed and tapped the plaster of my cast as we descended, “you’re helping me right now.”

“Yeah,” I smiled at him as the elevator door slid open even though he couldn’t see me. “I totally am.”

Caitlin introduced me to Jay, whom I hadn’t officially met outside of reading comics about the Justice Society of America on Earth-2, as Cisco helped Barry change out of the suit and into his S. T. A. R. Labs sweatshirt.

I had to free the pee, so I left the cortex and went questing for the nearest bathroom. Jay and Caitlin were gone when I got back. Iris and Barry were having a private conversation while Harry took himself out of that equation and Cisco sat at his workstation pretending he wasn’t listening. I shuffled over to where Harry was. I flopped into a swivel chair and said, “Hello.”

“You’re glowing,” Harry told me.

I looked down at myself to check whether he meant that literally. I wasn’t actually glowing, at least not at a wattage visible to the human eye. “Yeah,” I made a futile attempt not to grin and failed epically. “I blame my husband.”

“You’re married.” Harry glanced at the rings on my finger and narrowed his eyes as he looked at my face. “Aren’t you a little young for that?”

“I’m twenty-seven,” I told him. I didn’t tell him Len was turning forty-three soon. That was neither here nor there.

Harry nodded more to himself than me because he cared more about what I could do for Jesse than about whether or not I was mature enough to make a marriage work. “So,” he abruptly changed the subject. “How do you plan on rescuing my daughter?”

“Barry leaves residue behind when he runs,” I explained, “small echoes of the speed force that I can sense. I’m assuming Zoom is the same because they’re both speedsters. I can figure out where he might be keeping Jesse that way once I’m on Earth-2 and we can find her, then rescue her. I’m hoping Zoom won’t be near her holding cell at all times, but if I’m wrong, I will siphon the speed force out of him like a boss.”

I didn’t tell him that Jesse was going to be on Earth-1 when Zoom inevitably dangled her in front of Harry like a lure on a fishing hook. I figured getting his hopes up was a bad idea because my plan to save her then might’ve failed epically.

That’s when Caitlin and Jay returned from their stakeout with bruises and scrapes because Doctor Light had overturned the S. T. A. R. Labs designated stakeout van. Barry got back while Caitlin was patching Jay up.

“Caitlin,” Barry sounded equal parts exhausted and concerned, “are you guys okay?”

“Yeah,” Caitlin told him softly.

“Barry,” Jay exhaled a quick gust of a sigh, “I’m sorry. Doctor Light’s never killed before. I thought we could reason with her.”

“You cannot reason with someone under Zoom’s influence,” Harry practically shouted as he paced across the floor of the cortex like the pendulum on an old clock, “and now a man is dead because of you, Garrick. This whole thing is because of you, he doubts himself because of you,” he flailed one hand between the Flashes of two worlds, “but believe me, Barry can do what you could not. Barry can stop Zoom.”

Jay stood up and I hadn’t noticed how tall he was until that moment even though I had watched this episode before. “I spent two years hunting Zoom,” he said.

“Wrong,” Harry elongated the word until it became a weapon and jabbed an accusatory finger at Jay. “Zoom hunted you, you spent the last two years of your life running, running from Zoom.”

“Zoom would’ve killed me!” Jay yelled while Caitlin and Cisco exchanged a look because he hadn’t denied that he ran away. “Just like he will kill Barry if you lead him down this path!”

“No,” Harry retorted, “because he is not like you. Barry runs towards danger, not from it, because Barry is not a coward.”

That’s when Jay punched Harry in the face. Caitlin flinched at the impact as Harry caught himself on the rail surrounding the desk and swung back at Jay. I let the men trade a few more blows to get it out of their systems, then generated a magnetic field that kept them apart. Jay struggled against the field, an exercise in futility. Harry glared at me, but I gave approximately zero fucks.

“Enough!” Barry put himself between them and followed Harry when he walked away.

Jay turned to look at me and folded his arms. “So you’re a metahuman,” he deduced.

“Yeah,” I muffled a yawn in my sleeve. “I think I might be able to steal back the speed Zoom stole from you, actually. I could also restore your connection to the speed force by striking you with lightning, theoretically, but I don’t think me throwing electricity at you willy-nilly is a great idea.”

“Mac,” Caitlin had such a hopeful expression on her face that it hurt to look at her a little bit, “could you really give Jay back his speed?”

I shrugged. “I have no idea,” I told her, “but I think it’s worth a try. After all, ‘the thunderbolt is both the method and eternity.’”20

That’s when Barry went to procure the mask Iris shot off Doctor Light and Harry outed Cisco as a metahuman, because it turned out there was an app on Earth-2 for that.

“Cisco,” Barry glanced at me as everything I had said about how he treated other metahumans flew to the forefront of his mind, “have you known about this and you didn’t say anything to us?”

“Yeah, I was going to tell you.” Cisco glowered at Harry. “Thanks a lot, Harry. I swear I was,” he forced himself to face Barry, “but I didn’t. It’s just…I was…” he turned away because he couldn’t keep looking them in the eyes. “Afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” Barry wanted to know.

“Dr. Wells said the dark matter gave me this, this gift,” Cisco said the word _gift_ like it was actually a curse, “he said one day I’d thank him for it. What if I become like him?”

“Cisco, I don’t think any of us would become evil if we all of a sudden got powers, even if they were from Dr. Wells.” Caitlin said as Cisco turned back to face us.

“Yeah,” Cisco glanced at me before he focused on his best friends, “maybe you’re right. I should’ve said something. That’s my fault.”

I bit down on the inside of my cheek hard enough to draw blood when Cisco explained his abilities because I didn’t want to spoil his codename for everyone who hadn’t read the comics, which was everyone but me. Harry triggered one of his visions by yelling and generally being a jerk, Barry left to fight Doctor Light at the train station, and I booped Cisco on the nose.

“See? I told you,” I said, “you’re a hero, Cisco.”

Cisco shook his head so his hair flopped over his shoulders. “All I did was get a vibe.”

“Being a superhero isn’t always about how fast you can run,” Jay told him while he kept his eyes on Caitlin, “it’s about helping however you can, wherever you’re needed most.”

That’s when the shit hit the fan with Doctor Light and Jay had to talk Barry through creating a speed mirage so he could defeat her. I was sitting with Harry in the corner when Barry put Doctor Light in the pipeline.

“Hey,” Joe acknowledged me with a nod. That was progress.

“Hi,” Iris walked over to me and held out her hand for the shaking. “Barry and my dad told me about you, but we haven’t officially met. I’m Iris West.”

“Mackenzie Snart.” I watched to see if she would flinch at the name. I should’ve known better. Iris didn’t flinch. I squeezed her fingers instead of shaking her hand. “I have rheumatoid arthritis,” I explained, “so I don’t do the whole handshake thing because it hurts, but it’s awesome to meet you for real.”

“Nice to meet you too.” Iris smiled at me for a hot second and turned to Harry. “Wells,” she said. “Thank you for helping Barry put away Doctor Light.”

Harry nodded. Iris returned the gesture before she went to stand with Barry.

“So, what now?” Joe wanted to know.

Barry exhaled a long whoosh of air. “We do what Dr. Wells said. We use her to lure Zoom here. End this once and for all.”

“You can’t be serious,” Jay protested.

“More breachers are going to come,” Barry told him. “More innocent people may die. I can’t let this happen anymore.”

“You’re making a mistake,” Jay insisted. “Okay? Zoom is a nightmare you can’t wake up from.”

“I’ve already had my worst nightmare,” Barry retorted, “his name was Reverse-Flash. I spent a long time being afraid of him. I’m not going to be afraid anymore.”

“Okay,” Jay started talking with his hands as he crossed the room. “Barry, you may be faster than me, but you’re not ready to fight Zoom by yourself.”

“That’s just it, Jay. I’m not going to fight him by myself. I’ve got all of them to help me,” Barry gesticulated around the cortex to showcase his team. “I’ve got Mac,” he caught my eyes to let me know he meant it. “I’ve got Dr. Wells.” Harry raised his glasses as if to say, _you have my genius_. “I’ve got you,” he told Jay.

Jay shook his head slowly. “No,” he told the floor before he forced himself to look Barry in the eyes, “I can’t in good conscience help you when I know it will only lead to you losing your speed or even worse, your death.”

“Optimism must be an Earth-1 thing,” Cisco quipped.

Jay advanced on Harry and took his turn at pointing the accusatory finger. “You all need to ask yourselves why this man, for years, wouldn’t admit that he was responsible for the particle accelerator exploding underground.” Jay turned back to Barry, “he may not be Harrison Wells from your earth, but he has just as many secrets as the one that you knew.”

“Jay,” Caitlin stood in the doorway, “please don’t go.”

Jay stopped to look at her before he walked away. “I’m sorry, Caitlin.”

I shuffled off after Caitlin into her workspace. “You okay?” I asked even though I knew the answer was probably not so much.

Caitlin didn’t look at me. “You left a whole other world for Snart,” she whispered. “What makes someone worth that?”

“It wasn’t…” I sighed. “It wasn’t just for Len. I was suffocating on Earth-33. I’m physically and mentally ill. I couldn’t work. I was totally dependent on my parents. All my friends had gotten married and moved far, far away while I’d been single and still living at home for seven and a half years. It wasn’t the worst life, but I felt stagnant and depressed a lot. I thought I had lost everything when I got here, but that wasn’t true. I fell irrevocably in love with Len, but I chose this world for me. I can be independent here. I can be part of something bigger than myself. I have Len and I hope I have you guys too. All of that is why I’m here, not just him. Does that make sense?”

Caitlin turned and smiled at me. “You do have me,” she told me softly. “You had me at fulgurkinesis. You know ‘fulgur’ means ‘a flash of lightning.’”

I nodded. “It’s rooted in the Latin verb ‘fulgeō,’ which literally means ‘to flash.’ I’d be meta as hell whether I was a metahuman or not.”

Caitlin giggled so loudly she covered her mouth with her palm. That’s when I knew we had become friends for real. This was confirmed when she invited me to have coffee with her and Cisco and Barry the next day. I watched Cisco get Kendra Saunders’ phone number in my periphery and knew Harry was skulking outside somewhere like a creeper.

“Vibe,” I suggested after Caitlin told Cisco he needed a cool name. That was his codename in the comics, after all.

“Vibe.” Barry nodded in agreement.

“Vibe,” Caitlin repeated with a cute little revelatory grin.

That’s when I knew I had become part of the team.

* * *

**Scene VI  
** The Ultimate Boon

* * *

Cisco texted me after Doctor Light pulled a Doctor Griffin and escaped, and he got my reference to _The Invisible Man_ when I texted him back.21 It was so nice to have another geek to talk to! Len read classic literature and some contemporary stuff, but he didn’t get into genre fiction until he started dating me. Although he let me squee at him about the books I loved and he did like it when I read to him, so that was okay.

I arrived at S. T. A. R. Labs later that morning to find Harry working on his speed dampening serum to slow Zoom down. I wondered if Jesse was going to get her speedster abilities from reverse engineering the formula, like she did in the comics.22 I couldn’t help with that, or tinkering with the nanotech in the dart Ray Palmer designed for Oliver Queen to use against the Reverse-Flash, so I got Caitlin to remove my cast before I decided to look through all of the unsolved cases Barry had brought in that had been put on the backburner while they focused on fighting Eobard.

I separated the case files out into piles—one for the crimes that had been perpetrated by a metahuman that had died on the show (e.g. the robberies Hannibal Bates used shapeshifting to do before Joe shot him because he thought he was Eobard), one for the cases that might be introductions to other characters from the comics waiting to happen, one for the crimes that had been solved by our team (e.g. the robberies Bivolo did and the Green Flame arson cases), and one for the unsolved cases that I couldn’t figure out at a glance—and organized them chronologically, then alphabetically by surname of the perpetrator or missing person, then by type of crime, all with colorful tabs for accessibility. It was sometimes very obvious that I was a librarian. Let’s put it that way.

Cisco found me after Barry—as the Flash—asked Linda to pretend to be Doctor Light. I shuffled into the basement with him and sat in a swivel chair on the platform while Iris stood before the monitors and Harry paid attention to what was actually happening on the screens they’d set up. I wished I’d brought popcorn for this. It wasn’t every day you got to watch a training montage.

I loved the actress who played Linda Park on _The Flash_ when I was on Earth-33. I watched a terribad CW show called _Star-Crossed_ that was basically _Romeo & Juliet_ with aliens because she was in it. Technically she existed here too because _The Vampire Diaries_ existed and she was in the first season of that. I wondered if Linda knew she had another doppelganger in this world. I doubted it.

That’s when Cisco explained the plan to have Linda shoot Barry with false starlight until she got the hang of the gloves meant to mimic the metahuman abilities of her Earth-2 counterpart.

“Who exactly came up with this terrible idea?” Joe asked.

“Okay,” Cisco held up his hands and flailed, “it’s not a terrible idea, the suit can absorb the blasts.”

“For real,” Iris raised her eyebrows at him, “or ish?”

Harry grinned more to himself than anyone else.

“What does a terrible idea look like to you, Cisco?” Joe wanted to know.

“Okay,” Cisco said indignantly, “you know what? I like to think I can see the bright side of things.” I giggled because that was a terribad pun. Who didn’t love bad puns? “Okay?” his voice pitched awkwardly higher, “positivity, people!”

That’s when Linda set all the cardboard cutouts she wasn’t supposed to hit on fire. I did have sunflower seeds in my purse and a soda bottle to put the shells in, so I started eating those during the training montage and scooted my chair back to avoid the blast that knocked Cisco on his ass.

Cisco and Harry went to the docks the next day in the van to set the trap for Zoom; Joe drove Iris and Linda from the house in another car while Barry ran superfast. I took my own car down to the docks that night so I could go to Central City Picture News in the aftermath because I knew that was where Zoom would be. I got stakeout takeout from the _Motorcar_ and lurked in my car like a creeper until Zoom snatched Linda. That’s when I shook my hair loose so I could put on the domino mask specifically designed to work around my glasses that Cisco had given me—he’d wanted to make me a suit too, except I wasn’t made for being out in the field, not with my disability—and turned my wedding ring so the conspicuous eight carat stone pressed into my palm whenever I closed my fist while I waited for Zoom to return with Barry.

I could feel their battle, feel the lightning Zoom generated. It was brighter somehow, in a painful way. I felt Barry hurl a lightning bolt and winced after Zoom caught it. I still didn’t get exactly how lightning could hurt speedsters when it was literally part of them, as much as electricity was part of me.

I’ll admit I wasn’t a fan of the _Knightfall_ homage the show was doing to Barry with the whole Zoom breaking his back and holding up his unconscious body all over the city thing. That’s why I did what I did.

“Look at your hero,” Zoom said to all of the reporters in the bullpen while Iris covered her mouth in horror. “This man is no god.”

“Yeah,” I quipped, “but I’m a goddess.”

I reached out for the lightning inside his body and yanked. I felt the energy flowing into me until I condensed it and threw it back at Zoom to shock him significantly enough that he let Barry go and sped off slower than before to get Harry instead of stopping by the precinct like he had on the show.

“Oh my god,” Iris rushed to his side and whispered, “Barry.”

Iris helped me get Barry into the backseat of my car. I drove him to S. T. A. R. Labs while Iris worried in the passenger seat. “Hey,” I told her gently. “I’ve watched this episode, okay? I know how it ends. Barry is going to be fine.”

Iris sniffled and squeezed my arthritic hand in both of hers—I didn’t use my right hand to drive for obvious reasons—and I did my best not to flinch at the pressure. Luckily she eventually noticed I was screaming internally and released my fingers. “Sorry,” Iris wiped her nose on a spare napkin stuffed in the space beneath my emergency brake, “did I hurt you?”

“Only a little bit.” I told her. “I’ve had worse. I don’t think anything is going to top that one time my shoulder got dislocated and I ran into a wall to fix it because I didn’t want my mom to know I was getting bullied.”

I thought giving her a story to focus on would help. I was right. “How old were you?” Iris asked.

“Thirteen,” I said, “and my shoulder still pops out of its socket sometimes because it never healed right.”

“Barry got bullied too,” Iris told me, “even after my dad and I taught him to fight back against the bullies. I guess this is just the grownup version of that.”

“Yeah,” I pulled into the handicapped parking space in front of the building, “it totally is.”

We arrived at S. T. A. R. Labs after Cisco shot Zoom with the speed dampening serum and he ran away to fight another day. Joe and Harry carried Barry into the cortex and Caitlin did a full body scan before I told her that Zoom had broken his back.

I wasn’t impressed with how Barry reacted to being temporarily crippled on the show. I might’ve been totally bitter here, but he could literally walk off injuries that most people had to live with forever. I wasn’t even badly crippled, at least not comparatively; I could walk, sometimes even without a mobility device, but I still lost significant parts of who I was before my RA became a thing. Like drawing, and archery, and pretty much anything else involving full use of my dominant hand. Barry was going to be fine, at least physically. I wasn’t proud of myself, but I resented him because of that.

I took myself out of the equation and drove home because my bitchiness wouldn’t help Barry get through anything. I missed the confrontation between Harry and Cisco, who’d gotten a vibe about Jesse from him. I didn’t go to S. T. A. R. Labs the next day because I was exhausted from channeling so much energy. I had a theory about why. It was because I wasn’t a speed force conduit, probably.

Iris called me the morning after. “Do you have time for an interview with Central City Picture News today?” she asked.

I had just woken up and I’d forgotten there were cameras in the bullpen the night before, so they’d gotten my takedown of Zoom and rescue of the Flash on video. I had no idea why C. C. P. N. wanted to interview me. “What…” I groaned externally and gulped some water from the glass on my nightstand before I attempted to articulate further. “Why?”

“Because you’ve been all over the news since you zapped Zoom,” Iris told me. “Mac, they’re calling you Lady Zeus since you said you were a goddess. How did you not know about this?”

“Oh,” I buried my face in the pillow to muffle another groan. “Whoops.”

That’s how I ended up giving Iris a live interview with Central City Picture News. I used my powers to scramble my voice so anyone recording the interview wouldn’t be able to tell it was me talking. I didn’t wear my glasses to the interview even though my mask was meant to work around them because I assumed the chunky black frames might be recognizable. I put them in the pocket of my dress instead. I wore my black sheer dress over leggings and a neon yellow tunic with a pointed black lace collar, because I didn’t have another outfit. I totally regretted not letting Cisco make a suit for me.

“I’m not actually a goddess,” I clarified. “I’m a metahuman like the Flash. I got my powers the same way, from the particle accelerator explosion. I just thought it seemed like a good comeback in the moment.”

That made Iris laugh. I loved making people laugh more than most things, except books and Len. In that order. “So you saw an opportunity and you took it!” she smiled at me.

“Yeah,” I nodded and giggled a little bit myself. Iris had a nice laugh, and it was more contagious than any illness.

“So why now?” Iris asked. “I mean, why show yourself when you’ve never been a hero openly until now?”

I shrugged. “I want the people of Central City to know the Flash isn’t the only metahuman who wants to do good,” I said, “who wants to be good. I don’t think of myself as a hero,” I fiddled with the handle of my cane, “or a goddess. I am a metahuman, but I’m still human. I’m just a person who wants to do the right thing.”

* * *

I changed into other clothes in the aftermath before I went to visit my husband at Iron Heights. Len, of course, had seen the interview somehow. I think Joe showed it to him, probably because he knew Barry expected Len to start doing the right thing—or at least the wrong thing for the right reasons—and knowing his wife had been officially made a hero was meant to sway him onto the side of the angels or whatever.

“Hello, Lady Zeus.” Len said in that low, intimate voice when I picked up the phone.

“Shut your face!” I yelped. “These phones are tapped, dude! Also,” I pointed at him imperiously through the glass. “That is not my codename.”

Len chuckled. “So you said you’re not a goddess,” he grinned at me. “So you don’t like it when I get down on my knees for you?”

I flushed and buried my face in one hand because I needed the other to hold the phone. I exhaled a noise that was part giggle, part squawk, part indignant groan. “Shut up,” I told him.

Len grinned wider, showing his teeth. “I’d tell you to make me if this glass weren’t in my way.”

“Stop teasing me,” I told him. “It’s not funny. Barry is badly hurt, Zoom got away, Harry is freaking out because we still haven’t rescued his daughter, you’re still in jail, Lisa still isn’t speaking to me, and people named me after a mythological dude who turned into animals when he wanted to get laid.”

“Mac,” Len said gently. “Sorry to break it to you, but most of that is funny.”

“Ugh!” I buried my face in my hand again.

“Lisa will stop holding a grudge eventually,” Len said, “she wouldn’t be angry with you if she didn’t love you.”

“Well,” I huffed, “I guess that’s something.”

“I love you,” Len told me. “Whether you’re a goddess or not. Whether you’re a hero or otherwise. No matter who or what you become while I’m stuck in here, I will never stop loving you.”

That’s why I started ugly crying again. It was my own fault for wearing pearls on our wedding day.23 At least when Len made me cry, they were always good tears. It could’ve been a lot worse.

* * *

Bea called me from the airport when her flight got in early the next day.

“Hey!” I yelped, then dialed back my enthusiasm. “Have you been ignoring my calls or did you just not want to pay for international coverage while you were in Rio?”

Bea laughed. “Ain’t nobody got money for that,” she told me.

I nodded, then remembered she couldn’t see me. “Nope,” I said. “So you’re back?”

“Yeah.” Bea was smiling; I could hear it in the bright cadence of her voice. “Mick is picking me up from the airport, but he’s not here yet because my plane landed early.”

“Oh,” I said. I’ll admit I was a little bit disappointed that she asked Mick to pick her up instead of me. I hated the concept of a “significant other,” like a spouse was somehow more important than a bestie. If you were lucky, your spouse would be your bestie too, but it was also possible to have more than one bestie. Does that make sense?

Bea laughed again—she was laughing at me, but not maliciously. “So do you want to hang out tomorrow?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I was grinning so hard she could probably hear it over the phone. “I totally do. I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” Bea told me, “next time you go to a parallel universe, don’t stay gone for so long, okay?”

I giggled. “I was only there for three weeks, actually.”

“Seriously?” Bea said incredulously.

“Seriously,” I retorted, “and no time had passed there. So nobody knew I was gone. Which rendered the point of my return moot.”

“That sucks,” Bea told me. “So how did your family take all of that?”

“Not great,” I deadpanned. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Bea went quiet for a little bit while she decided whether or not to push me on that. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she told me.

“Yes you will.” I wiggled my fingers ominously at the phone before she hung up.

That’s when A. R. G. U. S. took her, only I didn’t know it until Mick texted me from the airport: **kidnapping my girlfriend is a dick move**.

I didn’t bother to ask exactly how it could be a dick move if I had no dick—because a clitoris was not, by the way, a tiny vestigial phallus. I texted back: **Bea isn’t here, but only because she’s hanging out with me tomorrow**.

Mick replied: **if she’s not with you, then where the fuck is she?**

That’s when a heavy lump of dread made itself at home in my guts. I accessed the camera feeds at the airport and sorted through the surveillance footage with my brain. I saw a man in a big coat leading Bea to a car. I couldn’t see from the camera angle, but it looked like he might’ve been holding her at gunpoint. Bea folded herself into the backseat, the man got in with her, and the car drove away. I followed the car through all of the traffic camera footage to Keystone City. I knew there was an A. R. G. U. S. facility in Keystone City that didn’t technically exist, in that our government wanted plausible deniability about whatever happened there. That’s where they had taken Bea.

Why had they waited until now? I had a theory. It was because Len kept taking out their agents, which he couldn’t do from prison. I didn’t know why they didn’t take her in Rio—maybe international snatch and grabs involved more paperwork than a kidnapping in the states. I didn’t work for a shady government agency, okay? I had no idea how those bureaucratic shenanigans worked.

I called Lisa and squawked with sheer relief when she actually picked up. “Lisa,” I said, “A. R. G. U. S. took Bea. I need your help—” That’s when she hung up on me. I made a garbled noise in frustration and felt sparks of megavoltage electricity fly from my fingertips. I snuffed them out before they burned the carpet and dialed Mick. “Change of plans,” I told him. “A. R. G. U. S. has Bea and we’re breaking Len out of Iron Heights tonight. I’ll bring the thunder, you bring the heat.”

“Sounds fun,” Mick snarled before he hung up. I knew the burning hostility in his tone was directed at A. R. G. U. S., not me. I didn’t take it personally.

I texted Louise next. I didn’t ask for her help breaking Len out of prison; I had gotten her off the hook for that particular crime, and I didn’t want to put her back on it. I did ask her to help me storm the A. R. G. U. S. facility to rescue Bea.

Louise texted back: **sure finals are over now so I have nothing better to do**. I texted her to meet us at my place in the aftermath of my homage to _Prison Break_ , only without four seasons of fugitivity.

I could feel the nervous energy brewing around me like a thunderstorm, waiting for a spark to ignite and strike lightning. I swept my frizzy hair up into a clip and gnawed on the inside of my cheek. “Let’s do this,” I told myself.

* * *

It was almost too easy. I used my powers to get myself and Mick inside the metahuman wing, manipulated the dampers to open the door to his cell and keep the alarm from going off, then I gave him a change of clothes and we walked right out with no one the wiser because I had used my powers to loop the security footage too.

Barry hadn’t destroyed the cold gun when he took it from Len in the aftermath of Lewis’ death. I had found it at S. T. A. R. Labs and stolen it because I knew Len would need it for _Legends of Tomorrow_. Unfortunately, my theft hadn’t gone unnoticed, because Cisco and Caitlin were there in the parking lot by our getaway car. Len aimed his cold gun at them; Mick pointed the heat gun at Caitlin in particular, which made her flinch, because Mick squicked her out.

“I tracked the cryoengine after you took it,” Cisco told me. “I was hoping you wouldn’t do this.”

“How could you steal from us?” Caitlin asked. “What happened to embodying your belief that metahumans aren’t evil? What happened to wanting to do the right thing? Was that all a lie?” her bottom lip trembled and Caitlin tugged it between her teeth like a punishment before she raised her voice. “What could have possibly happened in the last twenty-four hours to make you go back on everything you told us?”

“Look,” I tucked my cane in the crook of my elbow. “What’s happened is that A. R. G. U. S. has my friend Bea. I need him to help me rescue her.”

“Hold up,” said Cisco. “Beatriz da Costa, the super hot model who died in the particle accelerator explosion?”

Mick glared at him. “That’s my girlfriend you’re talking about,” he snarled. I wondered if Bea knew he was using the g-word. I hadn’t thought it was that serious between them. I thought wrong.

“Seriously?” Cisco arched his eyebrows before it occurred to him that a girl who could literally burst into flames was exactly Mick’s type. “Never mind, actually. That makes a lot of sense.”

“Yeah,” I elongated the short _a_ sound awkwardly, “except she didn’t actually die, she just got stuck as living fire during a photoshoot where she wore full body makeup with a high mercury content that made her flames green. I investigated the Green Flame arson cases while Barry was comatose and realized the fire was a person. I electrocuted the flames, which stopped her heart somehow, which in turn brought her back to human form. That’s how we became friends,” I swallowed thickly, “best friends. I haven’t mentioned her because she was visiting her mom in Rio when I got back. I was planning on introducing her to you guys tomorrow, actually, but then A. R. G. U. S. took her.”

“Why didn’t you just ask us for help?” Caitlin wanted to know.

“Barry was just in the fight of his life,” I retorted, “and now he’s using a wheelchair that belonged to the dude who killed his mom. I didn’t think—”

“No,” Cisco snapped, “you really didn’t. Because even though you’ve spent the past month trying to get us to trust you, it sure as hell seems like you don’t trust us at all.”

I felt hot tears stinging the corners of my eyes. “That’s not true,” I said with soft vehemence.

“Then prove it,” Caitlin retorted. “Come back to S. T. A. R. Labs with us so we can figure this out together. Mac, you’re not just a part of our team,” she reached out to squeeze my shoulder, “you’re our friend too. Let us help you.”

“Not if that means I have to go back in my cell,” Len deadpanned. “I won’t sit around twiddling my thumbs while my wife breaks into a top secret government facility without me.”

“I still can’t believe you’re married to him,” Caitlin told me, “you’re so nice, and he’s…”

“Not,” said Cisco, “you’re too good for someone like him.”

I ignored the implications of that. “I will go back to S. T. A. R. Labs with you,” Caitlin perked up, “if Len comes with us too.” Caitlin wilted like a flower in winter. “Look,” I sighed, “with the Flash out of the game for now, there’s no better way to break into A. R. G. U. S. than with a world class thief. I want Len with me. That’s nonnegotiable. I promise to let you put him back in prison after Bea is safe.”

I didn’t explain that he was going to get broken out again in a couple weeks anyway. That was neither here nor there.

Len scoffed. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Mac.”

I felt my fingers gnarl like claws and I exhaled hard enough to flap my lips in a futile effort to destress. “I know we said no spoilers, but an immortal villain is going to show up in a few weeks. That’s why I took the cold gun,” I told Cisco and Caitlin. “Because he’s going to need it later to fight an enemy the Flash and Oliver Queen can’t defeat alone.”

“What does Oliver Queen have to do with anything?” Mick asked. I flailed my hand at him to shut him up.

Cisco and Caitlin exchanged a look and we stood in awkward silence until I started to shake from the effort it took to stay on my feet. Len put one hand on the small of my back and stroked his thumb over the base of my spine.

“Okay,” Caitlin finally said, “we trust you.”

Cisco nodded and his gaze lingered over Len and Mick before he looked me in the eyes. “Don’t make us regret it.”

That’s how I ended up back at S. T. A. R. Labs with Captain Cold and Heatwave. Louise met us there with the edges of her glasses frozen over, her black hair in a floppy braid that slithered down her back, her oversized sweater more a dress than anything else.

“She’s cute,” Cisco told me. “Where’ve you been hiding her?”

“She’s nineteen,” I told him. Cisco was twenty-six. Totally inappropriate. I had no legs to stand on when it came to age differences, but there was a difference between a grown ass man dating a grown ass woman who happened to be younger than he was and a grown ass man dating a teenage girl. Fight me.

Len holstered the cold gun on his thigh and folded his arms. “She’s my baby sister,” he said in his calmest, deadliest voice. “What exactly is it with you and my sisters, Cisco?”

I put my hand on his forearm, a nonverbal warning to behave himself and keep his word not to kill anyone else. Including my friends. “Don’t you have a date with that cute barista?” I asked.

Cisco grinned, showcasing the adorable gaps between his teeth. “Kendra Saunders,” he said her name so ardently. I didn’t have the heart to tell him she had a soulmate and he wasn’t it.

“Yeah,” I booped his nose. “Don’t split your focus, dude.”

Cisco glanced covertly at the tall drink of deathglare that was my husband. “Good call,” he muttered.

Len unfolded his arms to wrap one around my shoulder, his thumb idly stroking over my tattoo. I smiled at him despite how anxious I felt. “I’m sorry,” I told him, “you killed those people for nothing.”

“Wasn’t for nothing,” Len told me softly.

I exhaled an ugly noise that was half snort and half the dregs of a sob. “How can you say that?” I asked.

“‘Cause they didn’t get you,” Len murmured before he cupped my face in his other hand and hunched to belatedly kiss me hello. I brushed my thumb over the stubble on his jawline and curled the fingers of one hand against the nape of his neck while my other hand clutched at his shirt. I felt his palm smooth from my shoulder and down my back until his fingers dug into my hip with a lovely sort of pressure. Len slipped his tongue into my mouth. I made a filthy sumptuous noise low in my throat. Len groaned and kissed me harder. I may or may not have whimpered a little bit.

Barry, who’d wheeled down the hallway into the cortex while I was preoccupied, cleared his throat. Iris stood beside him, Joe stood behind him, and I could feel them both judging me.

Iris arched her eyebrows at me while I flushed. “Okay,” she folded her arms before she cocked her hip like the gun I knew she had on her someplace. “I know he’s a criminal who should absolutely be in jail right now, but I get why she married him after seeing them kiss like that.”

“Who’s this?” Len asked me.

“Iris West, girl reporter and badass normal.” I flailed one hand in thin air between them, “Leonard Snart, world class thief and supervillain.”

I neglected to mention how Iris totally dated Len in the _Flashpoint_ timeline before she killed him. That was neither here nor there.

Len shifted his focus to the hero using the wheelchair and smirked. “Heard you were out of the game, Barry. Didn’t believe it until just now.”

“Hey!” I booped his shoulder indignantly. “I’m a credible source, dude.”

Len smirked wider. “I like to see things for myself.”

I knew Len being mean to Barry was a kindergarten flirting tactic, not unlike hair pulling on the playground. Len was very good at taking what he wanted from women, but he was terribad at publicly expressing his attraction to other men without being a jerk about it because he was raised by a homophobic asshole. That’s how toxic masculinity worked on him, I guess. “Don’t get so excited,” I deadpanned, “he’ll be walking again in a week.”

Len shrugged and held up his hands in mock surrender when I untangled myself from him. “Good luck with that,” he snarked back at Barry.

Barry looked up at me with so much relief in his eyes it hurt my heart a little bit. “I think we need a spoiler jar,” he told me, only halfway joking. “Like a swear jar, except for spoilers.”

“Nope,” I shook my head slowly. “That was a good spoiler. I’m using my powers for good now.”

“Speaking of that,” Cisco interjected, “you know how I wanted to make you a suit and then you said no?” I nodded. “Well,” he flailed, “I might’ve done it anyway.”

That’s when Cisco gave me a suit he’d made out of supple black fabric with electric blue veins through it that, upon closer inspection, were floral print instead of lightning. “I made it to be superconductive,” he told me with a grin. “Like you. Also the right gauntlet should immobilize your wrist so you don’t accidentally hurt yourself and I put next gen orthopedic inserts in the boots.”

“I love it,” I told him. “I love you, Cisco. I would totally give you a hug if—”

I was going to say _if I were a hugging person_ , but then Cisco practically threw himself at me and wrapped his arms tight around my shoulders, our cheeks pressing together while I squirmed awkwardly. Len didn’t stop him because he seemed more amused than jealous. I still noticed when his jaw clenched slightly.

I extricated myself from Cisco and went to change into the suit. There was a knee length skirt with sturdy pockets over a pair of lightweight bulletproof pants and a jacket. Cisco must’ve listened when I told him that my butt looked weird in pants. I kept my camisole on underneath, put on the domino mask, and swept my hair back into a clip. “Let’s do this,” I told myself again.

Lisa was in the cortex when I emerged, and she was not alone. Mark, Shawna, Brie, and Hartley were there too.

“Lisa!” I shuffled over to her with a grin so wide it hurt a little bit. “Did you become the leader of the Rogues for me?”24

Lisa smirked at me. “I guess so,” she flipped her curls over her shoulder, golden highlights rendered harsh beneath the fluorescent lights in the cortex.

I propped my cane against the desk and wrapped my arms tight around her waist. Lisa wobbled in her stiletto heels, totally unprepared for a physical quasi-public display of affection. “Len said you wouldn’t be pissed at me if you didn’t love me,” I whispered, “but you’re my sister, Lisa. I love you even if Len is wrong.”

Lisa hugged me back and heaved a sigh. I could tell it was more content that irritated. “Lenny’s not wrong,” she muttered under her breath.

“Okay.” I extricated myself from her, squared my shoulders, and catalogued my resources: Len, world class thief with a cryogenic weapon. Lisa, career criminal with a genius IQ and a gold gun. Louise, cryokinetic and smart as either of her siblings. Mick, arsonist with a superpowerful flamethrower. Mark, atmokinetic petty criminal. Brie, mad scientist with a thing for bees. Shawna, teleporter and nurse practitioner. Hartley, physicist and chessmaster with superhearing. Cisco, mechanical engineering genius. Caitlin, bioengineering genius with savant tendencies when it came to medicine. Barry, fastest man alive, currently wheelchair bound and probably not going to be helpful. Iris, investigative reporter and crack shot. Joe, detective sergeant and overprotective dad. Harry, abrasive genius with a speed cannon, also an overprotective dad. Making lists mitigated the anxiety, okay? Don’t judge me. “Here’s the plan,” I flailed one hand and I used my powers to bring up the blueprints for the A. R. G. U. S. facility and a scan I had asked the S. T. A. R. Labs satellite to take of the area onscreen, then accessed the security footage inside the building itself. “Bea is being held in a part of this facility that doesn’t technically exist. It’s not on the blueprints, obviously, but my scan picked up a heat signature that matches Bea. Which, combined with the footage I found of this man,” I brought up the image of a male agent named Jonathan Turton, “abducting her before he brought her to the facility, means it’s probably her.25 I think A. R. G. U. S. set up shop in Keystone City because their headquarters in Star City has been compromised with the whole turf war between HIVE and Team Arrow over there. That’s good, because it means we don’t have to travel six hundred miles to rescue Bea. I’m going to break in here,” I tapped a point of entry with my finger, “with two people for cover. Len is with me. Lisa?”

Lisa nodded. “I’m with you,” she told me sincerely as she knew how.

“I want teams of three here,” I pointed to potential escape routes, “and here. We’re setting our phasers to stun, not kill, but stay alive at all costs. We’re going to need a radio frequency to communicate during these shenanigans, Cisco. I want you to stay in the cortex and captain the enterprise.” Cisco gave me the Vulcan salute. I really loved having another geek around. “Caitlin, I need you standing by with medical equipment because I’m pretty sure Bea is hurt and there may or may not be a bomb in her spine. I can probably deactivate it with my powers, but I still want you to remove it without paralyzing her. Okay?”

Caitlin nodded, her auburn curls oscillating around her shoulders and down her back. “I’ll do my best.”

“Harry, if I can’t deactivate the bomb she may or may not have in her spine, you’re going to do it for me.” I told him. “I have the designs for you so you can work on that while I’m in the field. Joe, I made Len stuff his pillows under the covers, but I need you to make sure nobody knows he’s not in his cell. Iris, you need to get people to stop calling me Lady Zeus and shipping me with the Flash. I’m married and it’s creepy.”

“Actually,” Iris smiled wide and warm at me because somebody had to take pleasure in my pain, “people on Twitter are speculating that you’re married to the Flash, but nobody has seen his wedding ring because he always wears gloves. In fact, hashtag LadyFlash is trending right now.”

I buried my face in my hand. “Why?” I groaned. “Why is this my life?”

Cisco grinned at me, the corners of his mouth curling insufferably. “Bet you’re wishing I’d kept calling you Mrs. Cold now,” he said, “am I right?”

I ignored him. “Shawna, Mark, Hartley, I need you to work together long enough to clear this escape route. I get that Hartley is a jerk and Mark has anger problems and Shawna is capable of vanishing in a puff of crazypants, but this is not about you, this is about my friend who is currently being physically and psychologically tortured. Barry says no killing, but if you fuck me over, you will learn what a fate worse than death is. I will stop your hearts and bring you back as many times as I want. I’ll destroy you a little bit at a time until I leave you to rot in the pipeline, crippled and invalid. I’m not a goddess, but I wouldn’t recommend pissing me off. Okay?”

“Te futueo et caballum tuum,” Hartley muttered.

That was Latin for, essentially, _fuck you and the horse you rode in on_. I felt sorry for Hartley, because his supervillain origin story was getting fucked over by Eobard, but my best friend was being tortured by a shady government organization while we spoke. I had no time for grandiose multilingual shenanigans.

“Okay,” I said, “I’m sorry your parents disowned you for being gay and your mentor was a psychopath from the future, but you’re currently a huge waste of intelligence masquerading as impotent rage. Throwing around Latin insults won’t change that,” I muffled a yawn in the hollow of my palm, “commodum habitus es, Pied Piper.”

“What does that mean?” Cisco wanted to know.

“Well,” Harry gave me a knowing smile, “loosely translated, it means ‘you just got owned.’”

Apparently someone had explained the whole Harry being from Earth-2 instead of Eobard resurrected while I was in the bathroom getting dressed, because Hartley didn’t seem nearly as perturbed by his presence as he might’ve been otherwise. Or, because of time travel shenanigans that retconned Hartley attacking the Cleveland Dam, he was reformed and Lisa had blackmailed him into becoming one of her Rogues for this rescue mission. I didn’t know it then, though.

Anyhow.

I shrugged those shenanigans off and got back to the plan. “Mick, Louise, Brie,” I said, “I want you to cover this escape route in case we need to split up after we find Bea. Here is the rendezvous point,” I tapped a greasy spoon a few miles from the facility, “where I will treat everyone to celebratory pancakes or whatever in the aftermath while Caitlin drives Bea here in the S. T. A. R. Labs van. There’s another van I can borrow, right?” Caitlin nodded and went to find the keys for me. “Okay,” I exhaled in a sharp whoosh. “Let’s do this.”

Len took charge after that, explaining how exactly to clear the escape routes and break into the facility without fulgurkinesis while Mick drove and I pretended I wasn’t having anxiety attacks in the passenger seat. I forced myself to watch everything that happened to Bea. All they had done so far was test whether certain stimuli would trigger her to burst into flames. Unfortunately, some of their stimulation involved, well, instruments of torture. I had to get to her before they broke anything, physically or psychologically. I didn’t blame myself, not exactly—because this would’ve happened much sooner if Bea hadn’t met me, assuming she didn’t literally burn out before she reverted back to human form—but I hated myself for being unable to stop it because I had seen it coming.

I siphoned energy from the electrical grid underneath the facility and ordered their backup generators to malfunction. I felt A. R. G. U. S. go dark and felt viciously, terribly pleased with myself for making it happen. Cisco had given us high-tech goggles with various settings, including thermal imaging, colloquially known as night vision. I got a special pair attached to my spectacles like prescription sunglasses so they wouldn’t be cumbersome with my glasses and domino mask. I could see Len and Lisa in infrared, which was weird, because it made them look green.

There were lights in the building that ran on something other than electricity, which rendered the goggles useless. I demagnetized mine and stuffed them in my pocket. Len put on his other goggles, the ones meant to mitigate the glare from the cold gun.

I felt the metal in their guns before I saw the men at the other end of the hallway. I magnetized their weapons and pointed them at their wielders for a tense moment, then took them apart in midair and demagnetized the pieces so they fell onto the floor. Lisa tied the agents up and knocked them out while Len stayed close to me. I couldn’t access the surveillance with the power cut, so I had to rely on him to get me into the room where they had kept Bea.

“There’s an elevator to our left,” Len told me. “It should take us to where Bea is.”

I nodded and reached out to the machine. I asked it to do what I wanted and we got in.

There was another team of agents on the other side of the sliding doors when we reached the floor. I generated a dense magnetic field and pinned them to the walls by their belt buckles and watches and shoelace eyelets.

Len gave me a speculative look. “Could you tell the lasers in a security system to get out of our way?” he asked.

Gwen Raiden on _Angel_ had done it, so maybe it was possible for me. 26  I shrugged. “Probably,” I told him. I didn’t like how he had said _our_. I wasn’t Gwen Raiden. I didn’t want to be a thief.

Len used his cold gun to crack open the door. Turton had a butterfly knife to Bea’s throat. I magnetized it and stuck the blade into his thigh. “Not to the death,” I told myself as I avoided his femoral artery.

“No,” Len smiled at me, “to the pain.” I was so glad I had made him watch _The Princess Bride_ with me.

Lisa caught my pyrokinetic lady friend and holstered her gold gun to hold Bea up.

“Bea!” I shuffled forward and slung her other arm over my shoulder.

“Mac,” Bea smiled and I wanted to kill Turton for every tear I could see on her face, “you found me.”

“Always,” I told her softly as Lisa and I dragged her into the hall.

Waller stood at the other end of the hallway, inspecting the agents I had magnetized to the walls. “Impressive,” she told me.

“Thank you,” I retorted. “Now get out of my way before I stop your heart in your chest and forget to start it again. No offense, because I think you’re this awesomely ruthless lady who does bad things for good reasons, but my best friend isn’t a criminal and I won’t let you torture her into being on your Suicide Squad like you did with the last metahuman you came to Central City for.”

“How exactly do you intend to stop me, Mrs. Snart?” Waller asked.

I shrugged. “I was going to ask politely,” I deadpanned.

Waller laughed at what I had said until I stopped her heart in her chest.

“Mac!” Barry shouted, horrified, over the radio frequency I was linked into. I ignored him.

“Six minutes,” I told Len. “That’s how long a body can last without a beating heart. Start counting the seconds.”

I restarted her heart with a few minutes to spare once we were out of the building. I wasn’t a killer, but I refused to be scared of taking what I needed to survive.

* * *

It took us about two and a half hours, all told, to rescue Bea. I took Len home after we bought the Rogues breakfast at one in the morning. I was high on life in the literal sense of the phrase, adrenaline fizzing through me like electricity. I took my suit and mask off before I flopped onto the mattress and exhaled a whoosh of air while my heart thundered beneath my ribcage. Len hunched over me, one hand pressing flat against the mattress beside me, the other tangling in the frizzy tendrils of my hair to pull me into a kiss. I dug my fingertips into his neck and felt him groan into the kiss, his lips slanted over mine with a lovely sort of pressure while his tongue slipped into my mouth. Len broke the kiss and tugged my bottom lip between his teeth before he kissed my chin. I had my cast off, so I reached around his waist and pulled his shirt over his head. Len hissed when I dragged my supercharged fingers down his chest and over his shoulders. I had bitten my nails too short to scratch him even lightly, but that didn’t matter when my hands were literally electric.

“Oh!” I flailed underneath him while he nuzzled my neck. “Happy birthday.”

Len propped himself up on his elbows to look at me. “Thank you,” he told me softly.

“What do you want for your birthday?” I asked.

Len gave me that filthy look and smirked when I flushed pink in the dark because he was close enough to feel the heat under my skin. “I want you to sit on my face,” he told me.

I couldn’t tell him no. I was only human, okay?

That’s how I ended up with my panties on the floor and my knees on either side of his head, whimpering out loud while he sucked on my folds and fucked me with his tongue. I flopped onto the mattress and tucked my head in the crook of my left elbow, my camisole sticking to the sweat at the small of my back, my hips jerking helplessly against his face. Len curled his fingers into my hips and stroked my heraldic lion tattoo with his thumb.

I’ll admit I felt a little bit like a goddess when he ate me out that night. Len wasn’t on his knees for once—I was kneeling over him instead—but he made me come twice, the second coming almost too soon after the first, pleasure striking me so hard the evidence of my arousal was slick and shiny all over his face until he licked his lips and wiped the back of his mouth with his hand.

“Turn around,” he told me after he took off my camisole and unhooked my bra. “I want you to look at me while I’m inside you.”

“Is it weird that I miss you even while you’re fucking me?” I asked.

“No.” Len kicked his pants and underwear off before he sat on top of the covers and pulled me onto his lap. “I miss you every day. Living with you. Sleeping beside you. Watching you cook. Listening to you read. Touching you whenever I want. Taking you wherever I want.” I had no idea if that was meant to be innuendo or not. I doubted it, incongruously. “Wouldn’t have let Barry lock me up if I’d known you’d kept your promise,” he told me softly.

There was no accusation in his voice, only a thread of regret. I gnawed on the inside of my cheek as guilt twisted itself into my guts. I hadn’t meant to leave him alone for half a year, but it still happened. I couldn’t fix that or change it. I wrapped my legs around his waist and let his thick cock slide inside of me instead. Len clenched his jaw and smoothed one hand along my spine as I moved over him. I told him I loved him over and over until I got so overwhelmed by sensation that I couldn’t use my words anymore.

I knew he was going to be home for Christmas in two weeks. I still ugly cried when Joe showed up just after four in the morning and took him back to prison. I had kept two promises and hurt him in the process.

I didn’t feel like a goddess anymore.

* * *

I got a terribad viral infection of some kind that involved a high fever interchanged with chills so bad my teeth chattered without my permission. I couldn’t move out from under the covers because the shakes were too intense. I drank a whole bottle of liquid ibuprofen once my tremors calmed down and passed out again in the aftermath.

Barry used a vague illness as his excuse to keep Patty at a distance while his spine healed. Harry was far too anxious in the aftermath of the Zoom debacle to wait for me to get better. Grodd kidnapping Caitlin was a good distraction for everyone when I wasn’t around to meddle with canon events. I met Henry Allen as he was leaving the building; he thanked me for saving Barry from getting hurt worse by Zoom and hugged me. I wasn’t a hugging person, but it was nice, I guess. I missed the exposition about Gorilla City, but I already knew about it from reading the comics.27

“Why do the breaches on our earth lead to different places on yours?” Cisco wondered.

I resisted the urge to say _plot contrivance_. This wasn’t a story anymore. This was reality. I flopped into a swivel chair instead and crossed my ankles over the business end of my cane.

“I don’t know yet, Ramon.” Harry turned to face us before he acknowledged me with a nod. I waved, my fingers snarling like claws into the hollow of my palm. “But I do know we have to close them all,” he continued, “and I don’t know how to do that.”

“You don’t have to do it alone anymore,” Caitlin told him, “any of it. Together we defeated Grodd, and if we stay that way, we will figure out how to close the breaches, get Zoom, and get your daughter back.”

* * *

1\. Bea changes her codename from Green Fury to Green Flame to Fire in _Secret Origins_ Vol.2, No.33 (“Escapism”) December, 1988.

2\. Brie Larvan is a female version of Bertram Larvan, who first appeared in _Atom_ Vol.1, No.26 (“The Eye-Popping Perils of the Insect Bandit!”) September, 1966.

3\. I based the Palladium in Central City on the endangered building in St. Louis because it’s awesome.

4\. _Some Kind of Wonderful_  (1986) as written and produced by John Hughes and titled after the Drifters’ 1961 single, which in turn was written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, who didn’t get to record her very own version of this song that she co-wrote until a decade later because sexism.

5\. Alexander Polson, _Our Highland Folklore Heritage_ (1926).

6\. Foreigner, “Cold as Ice” from _Foreigner_ (1977).

7\. The Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics holds that there are many worlds which exist in parallel at the same space and time as our own. The existence of the other worlds makes it possible to remove randomness and action at a distance from quantum theory and thus from all physics. The fundamental idea of the MWI is that there are myriads of worlds in the universe in addition to the world we are aware of. In particular, every time a quantum experiment with different possible outcomes is performed, all outcomes are obtained, each in a different world, even if we are only aware of the world with the outcome we have seen.

8\. Disney’s _Alice in Wonderland_ (1951).

9\. Arthrodesis, also known as artificial ankylosis or syndesis, is the induction of joint ossification between two bones by surgery. This is done to relieve intractable pain in a joint which cannot be managed by pain medication, splints, or other normally indicated treatments.

10\. Bertrand Russell, _Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy_ (1914).

11\. Louise Lincoln first appeared in _Firestorm_ Vol.2, No.21 (“Cold Snap!”) March, 1984.

12\. Jefferson Jackson first appeared in _Firestorm_ Vol.2, No.1 (“Day of the Bison”) June, 1982.

13\. Henry Hewitt first appeared in _Firestorm_ Vol.2, No.15 (“Breakout”) August, 1983.

14\. _Lost in Austen_ (2008) is a BBC miniseries in which Amanda Price, a _Pride & Prejudice_ (1813) enthusiast and Mr. Darcy fangirl, swaps places with Lizzie Bennett and upends the plot of _P &P_ until Darcy falls in love with her. It’s basically a canonical self-insert fic. What’s not to love?

15\. Nanaue first appeared in _Superboy_ Vol.4, No.0 (“Sidearm, One - Superboy, Zero!”) October, 1994. Shay Lamden, the Arrowverse version of King Shark, first appeared in _The Flash: Season Zero_ Vol.1, No.6 (“King Shark: Bite Marks”) May, 2015.

16\. Jesse Quick—the daughter of Johnny Quick and Liberty Belle—first appeared in _Justice Society of America_ Vol.2, No.1 (“Home Again”) August, 1992.

17\. Charli XCX, “Boom Clap” from _Sucker_ (2014).

18\. _Flash_ Vol.4, No.32 (“Cold Call”) August, 2014.

19\. Thomas Dolby, “She Blinded Me with Science” from _The Golden Age of Wireless_ (1982).

20\. Joseph Campbell, _The Hero with a Thousand Faces_ (1949).

21\. H. G. Wells, _The Invisible Man_ (1897).

22\. Johnny Quick uses the formula 3x2(9yz)4a to draw energy from the speed force in the comics. Jesse Quick gets her powers the same way in the comics.

23\. There’s a superstition that a bride will cry a tear for each pearl she wears on her wedding day. There’s also a countersuperstition that pearls replace actual tears a bride will cry during her marriage. I like pearls, so. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

24\. Golden Glider is sometimes the leader of the Rogues in the comics. Which is what I want for Lisa on the show, futile as that desire probably is.

25\. Jonathan Turton was an A. R. G. U. S. agent who appeared briefly in _Arrow_ 3x03 (“Corto Maltese”) 22 October 2014.

26\. Gwen Raiden is a fulgurkinetic thief who first appears in _Angel_ 4x02 (“Ground State”) 13 October 2002.

27\. Gorilla City first appeared in _Flash_ Vol.1, No.106 (“Menace of the Super Gorilla”) May, 1959.


	3. The Return

**Think of the first love you ever destroyed**  
**because you’d never known anything like it before,**  
**like seeing your own heartbeat outside of yourself,**  
**a flickering, luminescent miracle—  
**you wanted to crush it to your skin.****

 **Think of the luster inside you,**  
**that spark that blazed the first time**  
**you bared yourself to another human being, said:**  
**“Call me brilliant as the sun,**  
**or ugly as a naked bulb,**  
**I am dangling before you  
**so you might not stumble.”****

April Ranger, “The Light Inside Us”

* * *

Shock Value  
**Part 1**  
 _A Book of Myths in Which Our Names Do Not Appear_  
**Act III**  
The Return

* * *

**Electricity** ,  _n_.

1\. A form of energy resulting from the existence of charged particles, either statically as an accumulation of charge or dynamically as a current.

2\. The power that causes all natural phenomena not known to be caused by something else.

3\. The same thing as lightning.

* * *

**Scene I**  
Refusal of the Return 

* * *

I went to visit my husband at Iron Heights, where I asked Len about his day and told him about mine. This was something we did before he was in prison, too. It was awesome to be married to someone who liked hearing me talk and who liked talking back. “I miss you,” I told him.

Len smiled at me, the corners of his mouth curling up in a way that was oddly gentle. If anyone doubted that he loved me, it was there in that smile for everyone to see. “What does our name mean?” he asked me softly.

“Soon,” I said.

Len nodded. “That’s when I’ll see you,” he told me.

I knew he wasn’t talking about my next visit, conjugal or conversational. Len would be home for Christmas, if everything went according to his contingency plan.

“Oh!” It occurred to me that I hadn’t gotten him a present yet. “What do you want for Christmas?” I asked.

Len smirked at me, his smile unfurling into something filthy. “Just you.”

* * *

Saffron Doyle was the first person I encountered on Earth-1 with a counterpart I knew on Earth-33. In the reality where I grew up, she was my acupuncturist and my friend. I chose Galvanism as a possible codename because she used to hook me up to a machine called the E-stem that conducted electricity through needles at certain points on my body during treatment, but in that world her name was Senna and she wasn’t biracial, specifically Chinese-American. In this reality, her name was Saf and she was a metahuman, but she was also my acupuncturist and my friend. That didn’t change.

I had no idea she was a metahuman until nearly a year after we met, when I conducted electricity between certain needles one day and she fell through her chair onto the floor in shock, pun unintended.

Saf told me over lunch—we started having lunch or dinner together after pretty much every treatment months earlier—that she could travel betwixt the in-between places of the universe, including spacetime. Apparently she went back in time to learn acupuncture secrets from ancient masters disguised as a dude after the particle accelerator explosion.

Here’s the thing: not only had I found another metahuman who didn’t use her powers for evil, but I’d found a possible way back to Earth-33 without paradoxical consequences.

I could introduce Len to my family.

I could let my mom have the wedding ceremony in our backyard she always wanted so her bitterness over me getting married without her would fade out like static.

I could see my sister and my best friends again.

“I’m Lady Zeus,” I told her quietly.

Saf nodded more to herself than me. “I got that,” she gave my cane a pointed look, “not a lot of superheroes with bright blue mobility devices, even in Central City.”

Yeah. I should have seen that coming. I totally bought another cane after that, but I digress. “I’m from a parallel universe where this is a television show adapted from a series of comics,” I added.

Saf gaped and let her hazel eyes go comically wide. “I did not get that,” she intoned.

“Would you mind taking me back to the reality where I grew up?” I asked. “Not right now, obviously, but maybe sometime in the future?”

“Of course,” Saf leaned her elbows on the tabletop. “I’ve never been to a parallel universe before. Is there a version of me over there?”

I nodded. “Yeah, her name is Senna and she’s white.”

Saf chortled around a mouthful of tater tots. “That’s so weird.”

I nodded again with my own mouth full of fries. “Would you mind taking me straight up back in time?” I asked once I’d finished chewing. “There’s a thing I want to do on May seventh of last year.”

* * *

I’ll admit that my least favorite thing in season three of  _Arrow_ was Ray’s fiancée epitomizing the Death by Origin Story trope.2 Anna Choi was a lot of things—systems engineer, culture jammer, chai tea junkie, avid reader of paranormal romance novels, the apple of her father’s eye, a demigoddess begat by the goddess Nüwa, a DMAB/AMAB trans woman and a female version of Ryan Choi from the comics—but dead wasn’t one of them.3 Atomica4 was her handle when she did culture jamming with the Lighter Than Air Society at Ivy University, and she was getting her master’s degree in systems management while Ray was teaching particle physics with his first doctorate and getting a second doctorate in mechatronics.5

Professor Choi—her father—had named his son after himself, but he rolled with it when he realized his son was actually his daughter. It was a human problem with a human solution. That, he could handle. At least she didn’t bleed seed pearls like her mother had.

Anyhow.

Anna legally changed her name, started male-to-female hormone replacement therapy when she was in high school, got sexual reassignment surgery when she was in college, and permanently removed most of the male body hair she grew during puberty with epilation. It took years to remove her facial hair, but that was neither here nor there. Ray wanted to kiss her either way, though.

Anna had also known Ray all her life. Daniel Palmer, his younger brother, was her best friend until he died of end-stage renal failure symptomatic of sickle cell disease. David Palmer, their father, died of pancreatic cancer when Ray was seventeen and Dan was thirteen. Susan Palmer, their mother, died of pulmonary hypertension symptomatic of sickle cell disease when Ray was twenty-one and Dan was seventeen.6 Anna folded gold and silver paper called ghost money into burnt offerings for them at each of their funerals: a Bohr model in spite of its obsolescence for David, a lotus for Sue, and a dragon for Dan, who loved hearing the Chinese myth about Shenlong with his human face, and the one about Huanglong who filled the void in the sky made by the monster Kanghui.

Nüwa was a goddess in Chinese folklore who chopped the legs off a giant tortoise named Áo to fashion new heavenly pillars after the azure sky fell and smelted the sky itself back together with multicolored stones. Anna was born during the affair Nüwa had with her father, a quantum mechanics professor at Ivy University. Nüwa was married to her brother Fuxi, and he eviscerated her after her daughter was born a demigoddess. Anna had to go on a quest through Yīnjiān, a level of the underworld called the land of shade, to find all the pearls of her mother’s intestines and put her back together again when she was engaged to Ray and living in Starling City, but that was another story.

Saf took me back in time to Starling City on May seventh, one night when the Mirakuru soldiers attacked the Glades on their orders from Slade. Anna supposedly died of a broken neck while Ray watched, unable to save her because his leg was also broken.

What really happened was Ray passing out after his calf got pulverized by a brute with superstrength before Saf and I dragged Anna kicking and screaming a year and seven months into the future. Another dead body with a broken neck got misidentified as Anna because her face was also beaten in perimortem. Apparently they didn’t bother reassembling the broken teeth to check dental records and she didn’t have a DNA sample on file because she was a demigoddess.

“WHAT THE FUCK?” Anna shrieked and elbowed me in the solar plexus. I shuffled away in time to avoid her foot stomping on mine. I guess she learned how to SING—solar plexus, instep, nose, groin—from Gracie Hart.7

Well, at least we had melodramatic reactions to time displacement in common. That was a place to start.

“Okay,” I winced. “Ow.”

Saf lifted her hands in mock surrender and took a long step back. “I’m a pacifist,” she told her.

I generated a wad of electricity in the hand I wasn’t using to grip my cane. “I’m not,” I deadpanned.

Anna kicked me in the shin. I induced paramagnetism to stick the face of her watch to the band of her engagement ring and used the metal in the soles of her shoes to keep her feet on the ground. Anna glowered at me while she struggled to unstick her feet, an exercise in futility. “Bitch,” her voice descended into a soft warning, “who sent you? I thought I was done with all that underworld fuckery after I got those pearls back!”

“I’m from a parallel universe where you’re a minor character on a TV show adapted from a series of comics,” I told her, “and you die faceless so your fiancée becomes a hero to avenge your offscreen death. I hated that, so when I found out my friend here could time travel, I asked her to help me save you, except Ray still had to become the Atom, so we brought you here, a year and a half in the future. Ray is not in a good place right now because rumors of his death are greatly exaggerated, not unlike yours, but I think getting you back might help with that.”

I watched Anna process that information—parallel universes and time travel were easier to believe for a demigoddess—before her focus shifted to her ex-fiancée. “Where is he?” she asked me softly.

I held up one finger while I pinged his phone with my brain. “Wait for it,” I muttered under my breath.

Ray went back home to Ivy Town, Connecticut while he was coping with his presumed death and moping like a sadsack.8 Saf and I brought Anna there because Ivy Town had been her home, not because of him. I hadn’t even known he was there before I pinged his phone, actually. Felicity had sold his condo, so he could’ve gone anywhere.

Saf and I left her in Ivy Town before we returned to Central City at the moment we had left. Saf called her power the ability to move through the _dào_ , the space between, the primordial essence of the universe, the ability to perceive spacetime as cyclical and simultaneous as opposed to linear.

There was a concept that was pretty much the same thing in the comics that explained discontinuity in the DC multiverse called hypertime.9 I figured those were different names for the same thing.

* * *

Anna showed up on my doorstep a few days later with luggage and a cello case plastered with geeky stickers. Apparently things with Ray hadn’t gone so well.

Here’s the thing: Ray didn’t think he could go back to how things were because so much had changed for him, but for Anna no time had passed since the night she supposedly died. Anna was heartbroken that he’d moved on not even a year later, because they’d been together for over a decade and they’d loved each other forever.

“I didn’t know where else to go,” she told me. “I couldn’t stay with my dad in Ivy Town, not with Ray looking at me like I’m a fucking ghost who came back to haunt him all day, every day.”

“Ugh,” was my response as I flailed my hand inside to show her where the couch was, then shuffled into the kitchen for some water. I had just woken up, okay? Nobody is articulate when they’ve just flopped out of bed after six nonconsecutive hours of sleep at most. I slept with a blankie until I started dating Len because it kept me calm and helped me sleep well, but it didn’t work for me after I got used to him, so I tried sleeping with one of his shirts as a pillowcase, but that only made me miss him more.

Anna stacked her luggage meticulously behind my couch before she followed me into the kitchen. I flopped into my swivel chair and picked the remnants of sleep from the corners of my eyes.

That’s when Louise emerged from the spare room in her flannel pajamas with the hazardous waste symbols all over the fabric and a pair of bunny slippers designed to look like the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog.10 “Who’s this?” she asked with a cold edge in her voice that was uncannily like her brother, her eerie blue eyes narrowed at Anna.

“Louise, this is Anna, the woman I saved from death by supersoldiers gone wrong by going back in time last week.” I gesticulated between them. “Anna, this is Louise, my cryokinetic baby sister-by-marriage who didn’t know my husband was her brother until her mom died of cancer and he shot the piece of human garbage that was their dad in the heart.”

Anna nodded. “I know you’re married to Captain Cold,” she told me. “I looked you up, and whoever built your fake identity is an artist. I wouldn’t have known it wasn’t real if you hadn’t told me you were from a parallel universe.”

Luna Nurblin built my alias before Len killed her father with his cold gun.11 I hadn’t seen her since I paid for my fake identity. “I think you’ve met online,” I told her, “you’re Atomica, she’s the Lunatic.”

Anna and Luna both had a history with culture jamming and hacktivism. At least they’d never opposed each other, so Luna didn’t have two reasons to come after my found family.

There was literal ice forming in the kitchen, but it broke when Louise noticed Anna played the cello and went to get out her violin, which she hadn’t played since her mother died. I sat on the couch and listened while they played the first movement of a Beethoven duet for violin and cello in C major. I had no musical talent whatsoever, but I did like classical music. I wheedled Louise into playing “Danse Macabre” for me after they finished the second movement, but that was neither here nor there.

* * *

**Scene II**  
Flight 

* * *

Hath-Set (alias: Vandal Savage) came after Kendra and interrupted her ill-fated dinner with Cisco a couple weeks after the demigoddess came to crash on my couch. I had my own crap to do between my houseguests and errands I’d neglected to run during the whirlwind that was these past few weeks: Bea getting abducted, me being ill when Grodd resurfaced, Len’s doppelganger coming here to threaten our Flash into avenging the death of Lisa’s doppelganger at the hands of Zoom because her Flash had lost his speed, Saf using her weird  _dào_  superpower to help me save Anna and change her fate, Louise becoming a permanent fixture in my spare room and Anna showing up at my house. I also had no food. I kept bringing home pizza instead of cooking real meals. I was actually getting sick of pizza, and I never thought I’d say that.

That’s why I didn’t meddle in the events of  _The Flash_ 2x08 (“Legends of Yesterday”)—because I was busy. I visited Len at Iron Heights and went grocery shopping the day Savage arrived in Central City and was cooking for the week the night he attacked Cisco and Kendra at Jitters. I missed Cisco outing Barry as the Flash to Kendra.

Caitlin texted me from S. T. A. R. Labs when Barry and Cisco took Kendra to Star City:  **I know we said no spoilers, but I think we need your help on this one**.

I texted back:  **remember a couple weeks ago when I told you there was going to be an enemy whom Barry and Oliver couldn’t defeat alone?**

 **That’s who attacked Kendra?**  Caitlin responded.

I sent her a nodding emoji with one hand and stirred the mixture of cabbage, onions, and potatoes cooking on my stove with the other. I was so glad I’d brought my lazy vegetarian cookbook with me when I returned to this reality. It had a whole section on potatoes. It was perfect for me. Caitlin got busy too after that while she tweaked the Velocity 6 serum Harry was engineering to help Barry get fast enough to defeat Zoom.12 I folded the fontina cheese into the veggies and watched it melt.

Louise hadn’t come out of her room since she bought  _Fallout 4_. I was pretty sure that’s where all my food had gone, but at least she remembered to feed herself during her gaming binge, so I didn’t have to worry she’d be a starved husk of a girl at the beginning of winter quarter. Anna was elaborately overhauling and updating the system Felicity and Team Arrow were using from my couch. It was a leftover from Palmer Technologies, which she had originally engineered when she and Ray were still together. I let them do their own things while I did mine.

Cisco texted me to ask:  **WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME ABOUT VANDAL SAVAGE???**

I shrugged, then remembered he couldn’t see me.  **I guess because I figured an immortal sorcerous psychopath who murders each incarnation of your new girlfriend in every life she’s ever lived is someone you have to see to believe** , I texted back.

 **Well, I’ve seen him**. Cisco replied,  **he threw knives at me, actually, so why don’t you tell me everything you know. Like, yesterday**.

 **Vandal Savage was born in 48,000 BCE in the comics** , I told him,  **but in the Arrowverse he replaces Hath-Set in the star-crossed Hawkman/Hawkwoman mythos from the comics, which puts his birthdate somewhere in the Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt**...

That’s when I remembered the Staff of Horus—a weapon capable of hurting, if not killing, Savage—was incongruously hidden at a church in Central City. Seriously, who would hide an ancient Egyptian relic in urban Missouri? No one, that’s who. I called shenanigans. Also, plot contrivance. That’s how I ended up going to church that night to see whether I could keep Savage from adding the power of the staff to his arsenal.

I got there in time to siphon the megavolt energy from the staff and stood between Oliver and Barry and Savage with lightning sizzling through me while my knuckles clenched white around the handle of my cane. Savage hollered some phrase that was probably Hieratic Egyptian before he said, “In all my countless years I’ve never encountered anybody with your capabilities! Astonishing!”

Here’s the thing: Hieratic Egyptian was conflated with Egyptian hieroglyphics, it was ostensibly spoken throughout the protodynastic period (c. 3200 BCE until around 3 CE), and it endured until way after the period of reunification (c. 2000 BCE - 1700 BCE), otherwise known as the Middle Kingdom, when the Arrowverse version of Savage originated. Coptic was used by Greek scholars who translated Demotic texts during the Hellenistic period (323 BCE - 31 BCE), and it overlapped with Hieratic between the first two centuries of the Common Era, but it didn’t replace Demotic as the main spoken Egyptian dialect until around 300 CE. Harry saying the name Chay-Ara was Coptic was historically inaccurate as fuck because the Arrowverse versions of Chay-Ara and Khufu predated the Coptic language by about two thousand years, so whoever the showrunners hired to do research on ancient Egypt knew nothing. Also, it was super racist of them to cast white actors as Egyptians in the flashbacks, so I shouldn’t have expected historical accuracy when they’re not even capable of imagining a non-white ancient Egypt, but I digress. At least Samantha Clayton the Sandra Hawke allegory and her son William finally got names in this episode.

Anyhow.

I stole the energy he generated for a second attack that never came because he sensed the emergent Hawkgirl getting her wings. I wobbled on my feet, unsteady from the power of the staff buzzing in my veins.

“I used to enjoy slow deaths,” Savage told us, “now I just find them boring.”

That’s when he brought the house of God down. I generated a magnetic field, but it wasn’t strong enough to keep the rubble from crushing me.

I was unconscious for everything that happened next until I woke up at S. T. A. R. Labs. Harry was in another bed recovering from Patty shooting him in the heart because she thought he was the man who killed Barry’s mother, but he was conscious and scribbling notes when I came to. Caitlin was sitting beside me injecting something into the IV attached to my forearm.

“Ugh,” I groaned. “Why do I feel like a building fell down on top of me?”

Caitlin heard my voice and a smile bloomed on her face in spite of the designer bags under her eyes. “Because that’s exactly what happened,” she told me, “you’re lucky to still be alive.”

“Not that I’m complaining,” I swallowed in a futile attempt to make my throat less raw, “but if that’s what happened, then how exactly did I survive?”

“We used the Velocity 6 serum on you,” Harry said, “and it worked.”

“What,” I groaned again, “but that makes no sense. I’m not a speedster.”

“No,” Harry gave me a tiny smile, “but you are capable of siphoning the speed force out of its conduits, like Barry or Zoom, so the serum temporarily allowed you to heal at the rate Barry does, which kept you alive despite the multitude of severe crush injuries you sustained after that building fell on you. However, the rheumatoid levels in your blood are still elevated, so your ephemeral connection to the speed force didn’t cure the autoimmune disease which continues to affect your joints.”

“Okay,” I dry swallowed and gagged a little bit, “how long was I out?”

“Um,” Caitlin pressed her lips into a thin line, “long enough for Barry to tell Snart he wasn’t fast enough to save you.”

“Oh,” I buried my face in the hand that wasn’t attached to the IV. “Oh no.”

That’s when I accessed the surveillance footage at Iron Heights and skimmed it until I saw Barry talking to Len. I paused it and simultaneously accessed the recordings from the phone line prisoners used to speak with their visitors, because the audio in the video feed was inaudible.

Len smirked before he spoke. “Hello, Barry.”

“Snart,” Barry muttered into the phone, “it’s Mac...she’s hurt pretty bad. We were fighting a man named Vandal Savage and he brought a building down on top of us. I wasn’t fast enough to save her. We don’t know if she’s going to make it.”

Len stayed quiet for a long stretch of time, his knuckles clutching bloodless around the receiver. “If she dies,” he said in his calmest, deadliest voice, “our deal is off. I’ll break out of here, and then I’ll kill you.”

Barry shook his head slowly, like a pendulum swinging between the slopes of his shoulders. “That’s not what Mac would want,” he told Len softly. I didn’t appreciate him talking about me like my death was a foregone conclusion.

“What she wants only matters as long as she’s still breathing,” Len deadpanned.

“Look,” Barry idly touched the glass between them, “me saving Mac in the future so she exists in our present is the reason the Reverse-Flash ran back in time and killed my mother. If she dies, then everything that’s changed about our timeline, everyone my friends and I lost during the singularity, will all be for nothing. I want her alive just as much as you do—”

Len burst out laughing, the sound I loved twisted into something cruel. “I doubt it,” he snarled before he hung up the phone and let the guards take him back to his cell.

I had no idea Barry felt so strongly about me. I didn’t like the pressure that accompanied this knowledge, but those implications weren’t my priority then. Caitlin’s phone buzzed and I stood up while she went to answer it. I was shuffling around the room, testing my strength, when she returned to the corner of the cortex Harry and I occupied. Apparently the serum worked, because the only pain I felt were the familiar aches in my joints.

“Barry is outside,” Caitlin told me. “Do you think you’re up for this?”

“I’m good,” I told her. “Let’s have a meet cute with the Green Arrow and his ilk.”

I had somehow avoided the darkest timeline where Savage reduced our city to scorched earth and everyone died except Barry, which I knew because we got to the farmhouse just as he was explaining the whole running through spacetime thing to Oliver, who glared at me because he had on his whole Green Arrow costume but he was unmasked.

I arched my eyebrows at him while I leaned on my cane. “Oliver Jonas Queen,” I said, “otherwise known as Green Arrow, which you told Malcolm Merlyn was a lame codename in the pilot episode of the show where you’re the protagonist in the parallel universe where I grew up, in which everyone who exists here is a fictional character. I know oodles more than your secret identity, including your suspicions about the paternity of William Clayton.”

That, of course, made his glower worse. I shrugged and shuffled into the farmhouse as Barry told Oliver everything that had gone wrong in the darkest timeline. Cisco practically threw himself at me and hugged me so tight I squeaked awkwardly. “I’m so glad you’re okay,” he whispered into my hair.

I hugged back and he let go eventually. Kendra side-eyed me, trying to deduce whether there was anything to be jealous of here, which was probably extra confusing because of the whole Carter thing.

I flopped onto the couch and cased the room, not unlike Len. Dinah Laurel Lance, Thea Queen, John Diggle, Felicity Smoak, and Carter Hall were all looking at me.

“Hi,” I waved and let sparks flutter between my knuckles, “you might know me as Lady Zeus, but I go by Mac. I’m still pissed they named me after a god who took fuck, marry, kill way too seriously.”

Thea and Felicity both laughed. Nobody else on Team Arrow had a Tumblr, I guess.

“What’s fuck, marry, kill?” Diggle asked.

“Exactly what it says on the tin,” Felicity told him, “you pick three people—celebrities, fictional characters, whatever—and have whoever else is playing choose who they would fuck, or marry, or kill.”

That’s how we all ended up playing fuck, marry, kill in the living room while Oliver multitasked by cooking dinner and brooding over the existence of his long-lost son.

“I would fuck Mulder, marry Scully, and kill Skinner,” I told Cisco when it was my turn. I thought about giving him Kendra, Lisa, and Melinda—whom he’d called “the love of his life”—as his choices, but I wasn’t that cruel. “Xena,” I said, “Buffy Summers, and Max Guevara.”

Cisco groaned and rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling. “I’d fuck Max,” he finally said, “marry Xena, and kill Buffy,” he flailed and clarified, “but only because she’d probably come back from the dead, y’know, again.”

“Gabrielle would not let you marry Xena,” Felicity insisted, “and their reincarnations totally ended up together after that one modern day episode. Fight me.”

I held up my hand. “I request the highest of fives,” I told her. Felicity indulged me and I grinned so wide I hurt my face a little bit. Felicity smiled back. I wanted to tell her to dump Oliver and ride off into the sunset with Laurel, but I didn’t. That wasn’t my place here.

Barry used his speed to steal a meteorite from the Keystone City Museum of Natural History the next day. I side-eyed him as hard as I knew how. “Hey,” I stretched the short vowel sound out awkwardly, “didn’t you want to arrest my husband for doing exactly what you just did when you first met?”

“Okay,” Barry huffed, “doing the wrong thing for the right reasons is not the same as doing the wrong thing just because you can.”

“Was murdering the Earth-2 versions of Al Rothstein and Eddie Slick doing the wrong thing for the right reasons?” I wondered, “and how exactly is you killing them for trying to kill you different from Len shooting the man who beat the crap out of him and his sister for years?”

“Well, fuck.” Cisco muttered. Apparently it had never occurred to him that overloading Atom-Smasher with radiation to poison him or hitting Sand Demon with lightning to shatter him like glass was, in fact, murder.

Caitlin looked at me as her lips gaped open in guilt riddled shock. Apparently that had never occurred to her either.

Barry compartmentalized and handed the meteorite to Cisco without answering my questions, but I knew I had given him something to think about later. Oliver gave orders to his team while Cisco synthesized a compatible isotope from the meteorite to coat the gauntlets with. I quit stirring the pot and suited up.

I was in the passenger seat of the van when we drove into the warehouse Savage had chosen to conduct his clandestine murder at. I absorbed the energy from the staff and knew my pupils were probably blown. I tried not to get addicted to how good it felt to have so much power inside me. I sat in the back of the van while the able-bodied heroes and heroines fought Savage, then zapped my way into the fray to steal the staff. Barry sped it and me far enough away to blast Savage at point blank range. Oliver grabbed the staff from my other side and they supported me while I condensed the energy until it burned the immortal out.

I stood between the Flash and Black Canary after Savage was dust. I knew the fight against him wasn’t over, but this was another kind of beginning—this, in hindsight, was where the Justice League started.

I shuffled out of the warehouse shoulder to shoulder with my heroes, because in this world I was a heroine too. How cool was that?

* * *

Kendra flew off with Carter the next morning after she kissed Cisco goodbye. I shuffled over and gave his shoulder a little squeeze. “How about we get some coffee from anywhere but Jitters, my treat?” I said gently.

“Yeah,” Cisco exhaled sharply. “Yeah, sounds good.”

I bought him an espressino and a mocha for myself—decaf, because caffeine and I didn’t mix well—once we occupied a tiny coffee shop called  _Spill the Beans_.

Cisco sipped his coffee and narrowed his eyes at me. “So do you want me to end up with Lisa?” he asked. “I mean, she’s your sister.”

I tilted my head owlishly. “Cisco,” I said, “you don’t trust Lisa. That’s pretty obvious from how you reacted when she told you that you were her only friend and you asked if any of what she said was true. I do ship you with her, but I don’t want you to date someone you don’t trust.”

“I have no idea how you can trust Snart,” Cisco muttered.

“I was raped when I was sixteen,” I told him softly. “Len takes what he wants, but he never took me, not without my explicit consent. I’m my own person, my body is mine, and he respects that. Len respects  _me_ , no matter what. I have no idea why you’d think I wouldn’t trust someone who treats me that way.”

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” Cisco told me sincerely. I could tell he didn’t really know how else to respond, but he meant well, and I appreciated that. It was grotesquely hilarious to me that discussing my rape made people uncomfortable, because there was no way they were more uncomfortable talking about it than I was when it was actually happening. Cisco was clearly uncomfortable, but he didn’t make it about his discomfort, which was awesome. I’d known many lesser dudes. Hell, I’d known many lesser girls, too.

I didn’t speak for every rape victim or survivor—we weren’t a monolith and every method of recovery was valid—but I coped by speaking up because I felt like we didn’t talk about rape enough. It was an insidious part of rape culture, the aspect that assumed rape only happened between strangers in the dark corners of the world. It wasn’t true, and more people should’ve been aware of that. Cisco didn’t need to hear my rant about rape culture on top of his fresh heartbreak, though.

I shrugged. “I wouldn’t change what happened. I like who I’ve become. I hate it when people say it happened for a reason, y’know, beyond male entitlement to female bodies, but I wouldn’t be who I am now if I had never been raped, and I like who I am now,” I gnawed on the inside of my cheek, “most of the time.”

Cisco smiled at me and showcased the adorable gaps between his teeth. “I like who you are now too,” he told me.

“Thank you.” I smiled back. “I’m sorry the whole reincarnated soulmates thing happened to you.” Cisco pushed his coffee cup into the middle of the table and pressed his forehead against the tabletop with a mournful noise. “Too soon?” I asked.

Cisco groaned and muttered, “Too soon.”

* * *

**Scene III**  
Rescue from Without 

* * *

I’ll admit I totally forgot to visit Len at Iron Heights the next day—or ask Louise to visit him in my stead—but in my defense: Savage dropped a building on me. I might’ve walked it off like a boss—or a speedster—but I still had a lot going on afterward. I didn’t even remember it was Christmas Eve until I got home and found my fake black tree decorated in a corner of the living room.

Anna handed me a green apple wrapped in silver tissue paper when I walked through the front door. Apparently giving apples was a Chinese tradition, because  _píng ān yè_ —literally translated as “silent night”—was Mandarin for Christmas Eve, and  _píng guŏ_ , which was phonetically similar, was Mandarin for apple. Anna was third generation Chinese-American, so that was a thing with her.

I had invited Saf over for Christmas Eve dinner because her family was in Idaho and she wasn’t visiting them because she didn’t want to drive up there like she had the year before. Saf’s mother was second generation Chinese-American, and she gave her daughter more apples that Saf brought over, so I used the accumulation of knowledgeable fruit to make potato apple bake, a thing I normally made for Thanksgiving dinner until then. It was apples, potatoes, and caramelized onions baked in a casserole dish with salt, pepper, nutmeg, heavy cream, and cheddar cheese. It was magically delicious and super fattening.

Louise came out of the spare room for the first time in weeks and threw her arms tight around my shoulders. I ended up with my face pressed sideways into her sweatshirt and my glasses rendered askew by her collarbone. “I thought you died,” she whispered.

“No…” I didn’t know where to put my hands, so I gave her back a few awkward pats in the vicinity of her shoulder blades. I knew this was less about me and more about how it had only been three months since her mother died, too soon for Louise to lose anyone else. That’s when I knew she loved me, and suddenly I had more sisters than I had ever known I wanted or needed. I might’ve ugly cried a little bit.

“Mac,” Louise sniffled, “you’re not allowed to die, okay?”

“Yeah,” Lisa shut the door behind her by kicking it with her stiletto heel, “what she said.”

“Lisa!” I flailed and Louise quit clinging to me like a starfish on a rock underwater. “I thought you were pulling a job over the holidays.”

“Shawna told me Mark was breaking Lenny out of jail to kill the Flash.” Lisa shucked her leather jacket off before she flipped her golden curls over her shoulder. “I know you hate Christmas with the fire of a thousand suns, but I thought you guys might want me here.”

I knew Lisa well enough at that point to know she was asking if I did indeed want her to be here. “Hell yes,” I told her, “now you can make those amazing butterscotch overload cookies you made last year. I got so behind on baking when I got crushed by a falling church. I only had time for fudge and sugar cookies shaped like stars.”

“Wait,” Lisa cocked her head and I was eerily reminded of Len when her voice flattened and sharpened like a knife, “a building fell on you? Why didn’t you call me?”

“It’s a long story,” I told her softly.

Lisa folded her arms, one dark eyebrow arching dangerously as her gaze fixed upon me with precise focus I had known intimately with her brother. “I’ve got time,” she retorted.

I told her everything. Saf chimed in to explain what she could do before Anna went on a tangent about Chinese folklore to fill us in on her partial divinity. I told her about Savage, the serum, the darkest timeline, the potential consequences for saving Anna if I’d unsynchronized the deterministic nonlinear system of this microverse by doing it. Lisa understood my explanation of the butterfly effect and chaos theory, but held up her hand to keep me from babbling on.

“So,” Lisa side-eyed me. “Lenny doesn’t know you’re alive.”

I shook my head slowly and my hair slithered over my shoulders. “I’m scared,” I told her.

“Of my brother?” Lisa said incredulously. “Lenny would never hurt you.”

“Of course not.” I clutched my skirt to stop myself from biting my fingernails to the quick. “I know the first year of marriage is supposed to be the hardest, but this is fucking ridiculous. I left him for six months. I didn’t intend to be gone for so long, but my good intentions don’t change the terribad outcome. I left him in jail. I made friends with people he hates.” Len would probably have sex with Barry if I weren’t in the picture and Barry was into it, but he still totally hated him. Allosexual people were weird that way. “I’m scared Len will leave me now that he isn’t stuck in jail anymore,” I told her softly.

Lisa burst out laughing. I flinched, which made her stop wheezing. “Oh,” her giggles added more syllables to that word than it was meant to have, “you’re serious. Mac,” her smile was fond but a little fed up with me, “Lenny’s so gone on you it makes me sick. I’ve known him my whole life and I’ve never seen him so happy. I think you’re pretty much stuck with me and my jerk brother for the rest of our lives,” she tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and suddenly her smile was full of deadly sweetness, “sorry not sorry.”

“I’m not sorry either,” I said. “I’m going to rescue Len from the Rogues. Don’t let my cookies burn while I’m gone.”

Lisa rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. That was a win.

* * *

I pinged the cold gun—which Louise had apparently given to Mark after he tried to break into my home and found another metahuman eating fudge straight from the Christmas tin instead of what he thought was an easy target—and drove to the abandoned toy factory where a spectacular testosterone showdown was going on. I stood inside that factory in a periwinkle blue dress with red buttons from collarbone to navel, the floaty material festooned with black and pink snowflakes, and gave the Weather Wizard a low-key zap that shattered the storm brewing in his hands. I didn’t mean for this dress to scream  _I’m married to Captain Cold_ , but it did. “Okay,” I stretched the  _y_ sound out awkwardly, “how about we do the toxic masculinity dance some other time? Cool?”

“What’re you doing here?” Mark growled. “I heard you died.”

That’s when I realized his plan to bring Len in might’ve hinged on the Flash being responsible for me dying. Although even in a universe where I wasn’t a factor, my husband was smart enough to learn from his mistakes and stop trying to put Barry down. I shrugged and shuffled to put myself between him and Len, eyeing the bastard offspring of the Joker and Luke Skywalker as I moved. Giovanni Giuseppe—alias: James Jesse—backed away, his hands raised in mock surrender, a manic grin on his face. “Yeah,” I shifted my weight off my ankle, “rumors of my death were greatly exaggerated.”

“Mac,” Len said my name in his smoothest voice and reached out to curl his fingers over my shoulder, like he could only be sure I was really there by touching me. “Hey.”

I turned to face my husband. I knew him well enough to deduce how worried he was from the set of his jaw, the narrowing of his eyes, the subtle downward spiral that had begun in one corner of his mouth; he was trying not to show any semblance of feelings, because he considered that a weakness. “I’m not hurt,” I told him. “Harry did a thing with a serum called Velocity 6 that let me walk off severe crush injuries, which is why I didn’t visit yesterday. I didn’t come and see you today because I knew he was going to pull a prison break tonight and then I found you doing the toxic masculinity dance on the cusp of the Rogues.” I almost made a bad pun out of  _testosterone_  and  _Rogues_ —testosterogues! I know, terribad, am I right?—but I stopped myself. I told him Lisa was home for Christmas instead.

“So what’s it gonna be, Snart?” Mark asked.

“I said I’ll think about it,” Len snarked back, “but for now I’m going home to be with my family. See you around, gentlemen.”

I looked over my shoulder at Mark. “Officer Julie Jackham was filling in for a prison guard who called in sick,” I said, “is that why no one died at Iron Heights tonight?”

Mark’s angry face slipped into something more stricken. “Julie was there?” he blurted. “Do you know her? How is she?”

Julie was nine weeks pregnant with Joshua, their son, on the night of the particle accelerator explosion. Josh was almost two years old now and I doubted his father knew he existed. “I only met her once,” I told him, “but I know it rains buckets when her son cries.” Cisco set up a system to monitor local meteorological phenomena because Mark was still at large and he’d been getting false alarms from the Jackham house for months. “I’m pretty sure he got that power from you.”

Mark flinched, gobsmacked by what I’d said. That’s one thing I’m good at, hurting people with my words. I knew it probably wouldn’t stop him from going through with his plan to leverage the lives of a hundred families against the Flash, but I knew he was going to call Julie and warn her, which in turn meant they might actually talk about how Mark had a son. I was meddling, but I liked to think I was using my powers for good.

Len waited until we were at the car to grab me and pin me against the passenger side door so he could kiss the air out of me. I clung to his shoulders and kissed him back, licking into his open mouth and giving as good as I got. Len cradled the back of my head and tugged my bottom lip between his teeth before he broke the kiss to press his forehead against mine. I covered his cold fingers with my palm and my glasses were fogged up when I opened my eyes.

“Why aren’t you wearing gloves?” I asked. “It’s freezing out here, dude.”

“Oh,” Len heaved a sigh, “must’ve slipped his mind.”

“Wait,” I said. “What?”

Len explained how Mark met Louise after we got in the car and he drove us over to the house in Danville where Iris and Barry grew up. “I owe Barry for saving Lisa,” he grumbled. “I have to warn him about Mardon and Jesse.”

“I know,” I told him, “you’re honorable. That’s one thing I love about you.”

Len scoffed at the notion of him being honorable, which has a heroic connotation, but I knew he was pleased when the corners of his mouth unfurled in a tiny smile. I watched him pick the lock and settled on the couch in the aftermath of the breaking and entering while he snooped.

“Want any cocoa?” Len asked from their kitchen. “They don’t have the mini marshmallows, but I know you hate those.”

I yawned into the hollow of my palm. “Nope.”

Len folded himself into an overstuffed armchair with a reindeer mug full of hot chocolate and smiled at me. “I’m taking you home after this,” he told me, “and you’re going to tell me exactly what happened with Vandal Savage, whoever that is, and then I’m going to fuck you until Christmas morning comes.”

“What,” I deadpanned, “did you just get out of prison or something?”

Len chuckled. I smiled at him before I went to the bathroom, and when I returned Barry had pushed him up against the fireplace.

“Well,” I sighed, “that escalated quickly.”

Whatever threat Len made about the core of his cold gun exploding fizzled out after Iris and Barry saw me, but at this point the scarlet speedster knew my husband had been changed for good by everything that happened with his dad and Lisa.

“I read your article on the disappearing middle class,” Len glanced at Iris, “strong point of view, nice prose style.”

I knew how long it probably had taken him to read it, but then he didn’t have anything better to do in prison when I wasn’t visiting.

Iris glared at him, disgust blatant on her face. “Yeah, well,” she took her place beside her best friend and glanced at me with a sliver of betrayal in her brown eyes. “Who needs a Pulitzer when you have the homicidal maniac seal of approval?”

“Len doesn’t kill people anymore,” I pointed out.

“That doesn’t change what he’s done,” Iris retorted.

I felt a smidgen of nausea twisting up from my gut. Iris didn’t like him and I couldn’t blame her for that, but I wanted her to like me and being married to a supervillain made me look bad in both the literal and figural sense of the word.

“Didn’t Barry tell you?” Len folded his hands in front of his body. “I had a rough childhood.”

I rolled my eyes because what his father did to him and his sister was horrible, but at some point between doing and taking whatever he wanted, he had to take responsibility for his own bad guy choices. “Seriously?” my voice pitched incredulously higher at the  _y_  sound, “you blame bad parenting?”13

Iris didn’t miss my eyeroll or my  _Jessica Jones_  reference. “Everyone in this room had a rough childhood,” she told him as she dropped her purse on the couch. “Get over it.”

Barry looked at me. “Why are you here, Snart?” he asked. I wondered if he meant Len or me when he said our name.

“I got into the Noël spirit,” Len deadpanned, “wanted to give you a gift. Mardon broke Jesse and me out to kill you. Jesse’s on board, of course, he’s shaking with excitement, but me? I’m gonna pass.”

“So what,” Iris glanced at me, “you grew a conscience?”

“Mardon wants revenge,” Len twisted his fingers together because he needed something to do with his hands, “Jesse wants chaos. I’m just not…invested like they are.”

I rolled my eyes at him again. Iris did the same. “You mean there’s no money in it for you,” she said.

Len smirked. “I was never much for nonprofit work,” he told her smoothly.

Barry had a fragile thread of hope in his voice when he spoke. “If you’re not in with them, then tell me where they are.”

“Nah.” Len crossed the room until he was beside me. “Consider me more of a secret Santa,” he took my arthritic hand in his, intertwining our fingers so his thumb idly stroked along the space between my thumb and forefinger while he spoke. “Besides, you and your friends love to solve a good mystery,” he turned his back on Barry, “you’re going to have to solve this one without my wife, though. Sorry.”

Barry exhaled an incredulous noise and turned to face us. I looked at him over my shoulder while Len kept his back turned. “You are full of it, Snart. I think my friends and I saved your sister’s life, and you just can’t stand owing me one for her. I hate to break it to you, but that?” he bit down on the consonant for emphasis, “that right there is called honor.”

Len cocked his head and looked down at me, a nonverbal  _why didn’t you warn me this was coming?_  I shrugged, a nonverbal of my own that meant  _this is your story, not mine, why do you think I’m being so quiet?_  Len turned sideways and focused on Barry. “Go ahead,” he snarked back, “make your pitch. I can see you’re dying to.”

“Help me stop them,” Barry said, his tone oddly soft.

“Sorry,” Len handwaved the offer. “I’m not interested in being a hero.”

“Well,” Barry eyed the wedding band on his finger and gave me a pointed look, “you’re doing a lousy job of being a villain this week.”

Len gripped my hand tightly, but he didn’t say anything.

“Mac,” Iris reached out to take my other hand, “you’re still invited to our Christmas party tomorrow night.”

Barry nodded. “Snart isn’t,” he muttered. At least now I knew he meant Len when he said our name before.

I gnawed on the inside of my cheek and my lips pressed into a thin apologetic line. “I can’t,” I told her. “I have plans with Len. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.” Iris squeezed my fingers. “I want you to know you’re always welcome in our home.” There was a blatant undertone of  _but he’s not_ aimed at my husband. Iris was telling me her house was a safe place for me to go if I ever decided to leave him, because she thought our relationship was abusive.

I felt warmth bloom in my chest despite how much I resented the implication that I would ever allow myself to be abused by another man after what happened to me with my rapist. Iris didn’t know I was a rape survivor then, so I didn’t hold it against her. “I don’t need saving,” I told her gently.

Barry snorted. “Snart said the same thing to me,” he explained to Iris before he shifted his focus to Len. “I thought you were upset because of what was going on with your family, but it wasn’t just that, was it? Mac wasn’t in this world,” he gave Len a knowing smile, “you were missing the woman you love.”

Len heaved a sigh, but I knew him well enough to know he was unearthing tension from his shoulders instead of taking a heavier weight upon himself. “Merry Christmas, Barry.”

That’s when he opened the door for me and took me outside by the hand. I shuffled back to my car with our fingers still intertwined. Len matched his pace to mine and he didn’t let go until I tucked my cane in the crook of my elbow so I could open the passenger side door and fold myself back into the passenger seat.

“How’d you know Mardon had a son?” Len asked once we were on the road again. “Seemed like he didn’t have any idea.”

“I knew Officer Jackham existed in this reality because we met on the night of the particle accelerator explosion,” I told him, “and I used my powers to investigate the meteorological phenomena Cisco kept pinging after I started hanging out at S. T. A. R. Labs. It all converged on a house leased to Juliet Jackham. I figured she probably got pregnant with their son from the comics a few weeks before the dark matter wave hit, which is how they ended up with the same abilities.” I yawned into my palm. “I’m guessing she goes by Julie because things didn’t end well for Shakespeare’s heroine.”

“I know. I read the play in high school,” Len sighed, “before I dropped out. I like iambic pentameter. I know it’s supposed to be read aloud because its rhythm mimics your heartbeat, so  _Romeo & Juliet _was Lisa’s bedtime story for a week.”

Len dropped out when he was a sophomore, so Lisa was maybe two or three when he was reading Shakespeare to her. I wondered how much of the play she understood. I was reading at two, but nothing like Shakespearean tragedy. I wondered if he’d taught her to read young like my parents taught me, by reading aloud to me every night while I looked at the pages and stitched words together in my head.

“I’m taking that as permission to read my favorite Shakespearean comedies to you,” I warned him.  _Much Ado About Nothing_  and  _The Tempest_ were my favorites, both comedies. I wasn’t a huge fan of the histories and tragedies were, well, tragic. I hated not having a happy ending.

That’s when he decided to quote Shakespeare to me, because his memory was eidetic and he remembered everything he read—including  _Romeo & Juliet_, apparently. “‘These violent delights have violent ends, and in their triumph die, like fire and powder, which, as they kiss, consume.’” Len glanced at me in his periphery and he must’ve noticed how into hearing him speak in unrhymed iambic pentameter I was, because he kept talking: “‘the sweetest honey is loathsome in his own deliciousness, and in the taste confounds the appetite. Therefore love moderately, long love doth so,’” he kept one hand on the wheel and put his other hand on my thigh as he spoke, “‘too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.’”14

“That was Friar Lawrence talking,” I told him, “you’re not supposed to seduce me with things a friar said. That’s profane as fuck.”

Len shrugged and kept quoting the play while he touched me lightly. “‘Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged.’”

“‘Then have my lips the sin that they have took,’” I said. I was so not Juliet, and he was so not Romeo, but this was sexy as hell for me. I was such a geek it was embarrassing.

“‘Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged!’” Len halted at a stop sign and leaned over the gearshift to tangle his other hand in my hair. “‘Give me my sin again,’” he said in that low, intimate voice before he kissed me hard, pulling my hair so I gasped and flicking his tongue into my mouth in the aftermath.

Heat coiled between my legs and I squirmed. All that stopped me from suggesting we park the car and get in the backseat was a memory of being in the backseat of my mother’s car with my rapist, which hit me vividly at the worst moment. I pushed him away because the anxiety churning through my brain made everything feel raw, like a freshly inflicted wound. I focused on how to breathe, inhaling and exhaling, inhaling and exhaling, over and over until I could breathe again without thinking it through.

I unclenched my fist and touched his face, the stubble on his chin a deliciously rough texture against the flesh of my palm; a distraction I sorely, desperately needed. “‘You kiss by the book,’” I whispered.15

“What’s wrong?” Len wanted to know.

“I had a flashback to that one time I made out with my rapist in the backseat of my mom’s car,” I swallowed thickly, “and thinking about him makes me sick. I didn’t want to kiss you when he came to mind, because I don’t conflate you with him,  _ever_. I know you said you’re not a hero, but there are perfectly nice dudes who do horrible things like raping the girls they supposedly love—”

That’s when the car behind us honked. Len made a disgruntled noise and untangled the hand in my hair before he stepped on the gas. “I’d never hurt you,” he said with slow vehemence. “I’d die first.”

I made a valiant effort not to ugly cry, which failed epically. “I know,” I said. “I love you.”

Len turned onto the private road which led through the acre of woods to our house. “I love you more,” he told me softly.

“Nope.” I shook my head slowly. “Not possible.”

Len stole a quick kiss and nipped my bottom lip before he unbuckled his seatbelt and got out of the car. I shuffled into the house and hung my cane on its hook by the front door along with my purse and sweater. Len shucked his parka off, then unstrapped the holster with his cold gun from his thigh and kicked his boots off after he hung the parka up.

Lisa told me that Anna was with Ray when I wondered where she went. Apparently he showed up on my doorstep looking for her and invited her back to his hotel room to talk. I doubted much talking was going on and squashed the urge to text her because I figured she’d tell me what happened later.

Mick was setting the table when I entered the dining room. I’d invited Bea over for Christmas Eve, so I knew he was going to be there.

Len folded his arms. “Mick,” he said in his calmest voice. That’s how I knew he was angry.

“Sorry,” Mick grumbled.

Bea snorted. “That was so weak,” she told him.

“I accept your apology,” Len smirked at him, “weak though it was. Merry Christmas.”

“Awesome,” I flopped into the chair next to Bea and yawned while Len took his seat between Lisa and me. “Let’s eat.”

Len kicked everyone out after dessert while I was doing the dishes. Lisa decided to take Louise out to a late movie, Bea took Mick back to her place, and then there were two.

I undid the clip in my hair and left it on the dresser. Len closed our bedroom door behind him before he yanked his shirt over his head. Then he unbuttoned his pants and dropped them along with his underwear. I may or may not have gulped. “Turn around,” he told me.

I did what he said and shuffled until I faced the mattress, my kneecaps meeting the worn flannel sheets.

Len kissed my neck while he unbuttoned my snowflake dress and unhooked my bra as the dress puddled on the floor. “Take off your panties,” he said in his smoothest voice, “then get on your knees and spread your pretty cunt for me.”

I ended up on my knees with my hands between my legs, peeling back the folds of my cunt so he could see everything. Len knelt on the floor in front of our bed and grabbed my ass in both hands, squeezing and spreading me further apart before he licked into me greedily. I inhaled sharply and exhaled a harsh, loud whine. Len kept teasing me with his tongue until I was trembling and my whole body was clenched tight with heavy want.

Len flicked the flat of his tongue over my clit and stopped cold after I whimpered. I could practically feel him smirking even though his mouth wasn’t on me anymore. “Say my name,” he told me.

“Len…” I squirmed when his fingertips swirled into my wet hole. “Len, please…”

“I thought about fucking you like this when I was in jail,” Len growled and he was so close I felt his voice like something palpable. “I wanted you handcuffed to the door of my cell so I could take you from behind and show everyone what a slut you are for me,” he worked two fingers inside me and crooked them precisely to make me moan his name again, “and only me, hmm?”

“Yes,” I gasped when a tendril of pleasure coiled through me.

“Yes, what?” Len kept teasing my clit while he fucked me with his other hand. I could practically feel him grinning at the vulgar wet noises my cunt was making for him as he moved his fingers in and out of me. “Be specific, Mac.”

I wanted to tell him that calling me a slut was rude because the word should’ve been obsolete, regardless of its gendered connotation. I also hated the double standard implied by how pleased he was to be my first and only. I wasn’t his first or his only, but he was my husband and we loved each other. I didn’t care about who or what had come before as long as that was true. That’s why I told him what he wanted to hear instead of calling him on being a possessive loser. “Yes,” I blushed and peeked over my shoulder at him. “I’m a slut for you and only you.”

Len rose and knelt behind me before he pulled me against his chest, so I was kneeling with his hands between my legs. I reached back to stroke his hair and clung to the nape of his neck after he curled his fingers inside me again. “Come for me,” he whispered in my ear. “I want to feel you go all over my fingers,” his thumb brushed sideways over my clit and I whimpered at the sensation. “Come for me.”

I squirmed to get more friction and my orgasm hit me like a lightning strike, exquisite and bright. Len held me and stroked me through it while a shrill noise snagged in my throat.

I slumped onto my elbows with a  _whoosh_ of air. Len settled over me and sucked my slick from his fingers before he took my hand in his. “I love you,” he told me, “and only you.”

Len didn’t go anywhere near gentle that night. Instead he fucked me roughly from behind, the head of his cock bumping my cervix with every hard thrust, our left hands intertwined while our bodies moved together in a wild rhythm. I lost all sense of where he ended and I began. I stopped thinking and thunder struck inside me. Len came so hard he buried a loud, guttural moan in the space between my neck and shoulder.

“I love you too,” I told him softly.

Len squeezed my hand. “I forgot how much you like doing what you’re told,” he told me smugly. “Why is that, hmm?”

I wriggled under him until I could look at his face, and saw his pupils were blown so wide the blues and greys of his varicolored irises were almost blacked out. “I don’t have any good sexual experience that isn’t with you,” I explained. “I remember everything I did with my rapist that wasn’t the rape itself like an autoscopy because it was so boring. I like that you know what you like and you’re capable of articulating what you want from me during sex, because I have no idea what I’m doing and I want to please you.”

“Mac,” Len smoothed his hand up the curve of my spine to cup my face, “you do a lot more than just please me. I don’t have any romantic experience that isn’t with you,” he told me softly, “you’re the only person I’ve ever made love to.”

That’s when he kissed me again. I squeezed his hand and kissed him back. “Oh!” I broke the kiss to ask, “do you want to go to the tree lighting ceremony with me tomorrow?”

“Sure.” Len kissed my chin. “I suppose I can go incognito.”

That’s when he palmed my breasts and curled his fingers into my flesh with a lovely sort of pressure, his thumbs brushing my nipples gently at first, then rougher once I asked for more. I clung to his shoulders while he teased my nipples. Len flicked one hard nub with his tongue over and over before he shifted his focus to the other. I squirmed when he scraped his teeth over my breasts until I was flushed and hypersensitive.

Len stopped using his mouth on my breasts to nuzzle my belly. I thought he wouldn’t eat me out again because my cunt was still full of his come. I thought wrong. “Len,” I whined a little bit when he licked up the semen that had trickled down my thigh. “I’m full of—”

“I know,” Len spread my thighs further apart to get a better look at the mess he’d made and grinned up at me from between my legs, “it’s mine. I came inside you and now I’m going to eat it out of you.”

That’s when he licked me from my perineum into my slit. I gnawed on the inside of my cheek and blushed as I watched him swallow his come. That shouldn’t have been sexy. That shouldn’t have gotten me wetter. I had no idea a person could be simultaneously turned on and totally squicked out. I thought Len wouldn’t notice how embarrassingly into it I was because he was busy cleaning up his mess. I thought wrong, and he decided to go down on me for over an hour after his come was gone.

Len kept me close to the edge of another orgasm without making me come until my whole body was aching for it. I was hyperaware of every ricochet of pleasure in my body, hyperfocused on everywhere he was touching me. I dug my fingers into the nape of his neck and moaned in frustration. “Len,” I said his name breathlessly, “please make me come before my body throws off enough discharge to create a flashover and I explode.”

Len stroked my hipbone and threw off tiny sparks with his touch. “What’s a flashover?” he asked.

I huffed. “Harry thinks my body theoretically has infinite capacitance for conducting electricity, and that I accumulate charge and store it electrostatically until I convert it dynamically into electric currents,” I explained, “and when I use paramagnetism, the magnetic fields I generate induce high voltage in those electric currents. If the voltage-current amplitude ratio in my body shifts too much, I may throw off electrical arcs of heat and light that could kill you. That’s a flashover.”

Len sighed and splayed his fingers over my belly to hold me down. “I must not be doing this right if you’re still talking so much,” he murmured before he pressed his mouth over my clit and sucked it. I yelped and came harder than I ever had in my life, the first orgasm twisting into the second while my hips jerked helplessly against his face. I could feel every bit of metal in the house and every jolt of electricity in the walls. I didn’t hear the cacophony of thuds because I was so far gone, but later I’d learn that I’d attracted every single piece of cutlery in the kitchen to our bedroom door. “Well,” Len stroked the damp curls between my legs and smirked at me, “not so articulate now, hmm?”

“Hng,” I whimpered.

Len quit kneeling between my legs and moved to sit with his legs crossed, the head of his cock dripping with precome, his thighs slick with sweat and my arousal. I was abruptly overwhelmed by how much I wanted more of him. Luckily the feeling was mutual. “Come here,” he told me.

I crawled into his lap and kissed him, tasting my own arousal on his lips while he fisted one hand in the frizzy tendrils of my hair. Len tilted my head up and broke the kiss to nip my throat, stringing kisses with a hint teeth down along my neck as he fisted his other hand around his cock and slipped the head of him inside me. I wrapped my legs around his waist and took him gladly.

There were no more words, because we didn’t need any. I nuzzled his nose with mine and shifted my hips against his. Len held my gaze while he thrust up into me, and the heat in his eyes was all it took to push me over the edge again. I wrapped my arms loosely around his neck and clung to him, shuddering. Len hissed as the aftershocks flickered around his cock and came inside me again with a soft noise that was probably my name. I flailed in a futile attempt to get up. Len chuckled and flopped onto his back. “I doubt your legs work,” he told me in a smug voice rendered hoarse by all the sex.

“Rude,” I huffed again without heat and smiled at him.

Len grinned back and pulled me down on top of him before he stole another kiss. “Merry Christmas, Mac.”

I thought about telling him that I still totally hated Christmas. I nuzzled his clavicle and snuggled against him instead. “Merry Christmas, Len.”

* * *

Christmas morning involved Len reassembling the furniture I’d magnetized the screws out of when he made me come super hard—pun intended—and me fulgurkinetically putting all of the cutlery in the dishwasher, except my cooking knives, which I washed by hand in the sink. Len turned my swivel chair around once I was done and cupped my face before he crouched to kiss me. I stroked his short hair while I kissed him back and noticed it was a little bit longer than he liked. I had a hunch it would’ve been an afro if he grew it out. I would’ve liked to see that, but I knew he kept his hair short because he didn’t want to do anything to it, so I didn’t mention it.

I broke the kiss to ask, “do you want me to give you a haircut?”

Len smiled at me, a soft unfurling of his mouth that didn’t show his teeth. “Sure.”

Lisa found us outside on the porch and leaned against the doorframe as she yawned. “Hey,” she tucked a messy ringlet behind her ear and used a shiny gold polished fingernail to slice the sleep from the corners of her eyes.

Len waved to his sister without facing her because I had a razor at the back of his neck. “Hey, Sis.”

“Hi,” I said to Lisa after I switched the razor off. Len had taken his shirt off despite how cold it was outside, and he put it back on after I was done cutting his hair shorter.

“What’s wrong?” Lisa raised one eyebrow at me. “You look sad.”

Len turned to look at me and he knew me well enough to see that I was indeed having a case of the sads. I exhaled with enough force to flap my lips and leaned against the porch rail because I hadn’t bothered to use my cane. “This,” I flailed one hand at the razor, “is a thing my mom does for my dad. That’s all.”

“You miss your family,” Len deduced.

“You’re my family.” I glanced at Lisa before I had a staring contest with the porch and lost. “You both are.”

Len rose smoothly and tilted my face up until I was looking at him. “You missing them doesn’t mean we’re not a family too,” he told me softly.

I ugly cried so hard I shook with it. Len took off my glasses and folded them on the porch rail before he wrapped his arms tight around me. “I…” I sniffled, “I try so hard not to think about them.” I hadn’t told Len what Saf could do yet. I decided to bite the bullet. “Saf might be able to take me back to Earth-33 through the  _dào_.” I could feel the look he exchanged with his sister even though I didn’t see it. Lisa did know about Saf after the other day. “I don’t want to leave you again, so I don’t think about it, but sometimes I just...” I swallowed thickly. “I miss them so much.”

“Then we should go there,” Lisa said.

Len smoothed one hand along my spine through my top as I squinted at her over his forearm. “What?” I stretched the short  _a_  sound out awkwardly while I put my glasses back on.

Lisa shrugged, her chin tilting into the hunch of her shoulder. “Lenny meeting your parents?” she grinned at me. “I wouldn’t miss that for the multiverse.”

I stroked the hollow between his shoulder blades. “You don’t have to meet my parents,” I said.

“I want to,” Len smirked at me, “do you think your dad would call me a hoodlum to my face?”

“Probably,” I told him with a waterlogged giggle, “but my dad is pretty cool. Unlike my mom, who has approximately zero chill.”

Len smirked wider. “You take after her, hmm?”

I could’ve reminded him that I was adopted. I wrapped my arms tight around his waist and hugged him instead. “Yeah,” I said. “I totally do. Oh!” I flailed until he let go and shuffled into the house to fetch his present from under the Christmas tree.

“What’s this?” Len asked.

“I know you said all you wanted for Christmas was me,” I said, “but I got you this anyway.” That was another thing I had in common with my mom, who gave people gifts they didn’t ask for and probably didn’t want. I figured Len would like my gift, though. I arched my eyebrows and held it out to him.

Len took it from me and looked down at the square box in his hands. “I didn’t get you anything,” he told me softly.

I shrugged. I hadn’t expected him to get me a gift while he was in jail. Len was very good, but not that good. “I have everything I want,” I retorted, “open it.”

Len opened the lid and tucked the box inside it before he peeled back the silver tissue paper to reveal a hundred and thirty-seven carat double rose cut yellow diamond. “Where did you get this?” he wondered.

“Saf took me back in time to steal it,” I told him.

“Is that the Florentine diamond?” Lisa pointed at the stone with one gold fingernail. “Wasn’t it stolen in 1918 and lost during Prohibition?”

I nodded. “I did research on the diamond for a school project on Earth-33,” I explained, “and found reports of a seventy carat diamond that might’ve been the recut Florentine, including testimony from the woman who sold the diamond at auction in Switzerland in 1981, whose father supposedly recut it after it was stolen by her grandfather. I checked the records in this reality, and those reports don’t exist, ostensibly because I stole the diamond from her grandfather before it could be recut in this world and created a causality loop. I thought about waiting to steal it with you,” I told him, “but there’s so much art lost to history. I figured we could do that another time,” I giggled when I realized I’d made a pun, “literally.”

Len picked up the diamond and held it until the stone refracted the harsh grey sunlight dripping through the clouds. “Thank you,” he said in a soft, fervent voice. “It’s perfect. It belonged to the Medici family, the pope who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the Habsburgs, and the last ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was supposedly worn by the Duke of Burgundy when he fell in battle. It was faceted two decades later in the fifteenth century…”

“It was valued at seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the eighteenth century,” Lisa folded her arms. “It’s probably worth millions today, if not billions.”

“I guess you could sell it,” I told him, “if you’d rather have the money.” I liked getting money for Christmas instead of presents, so I would’ve understood if that’s what he wanted.

“No.” Len shook his head with slow vehemence. “I’m going to have this made into a necklace, and then I’m going to fuck you while you’re wearing it and nothing else.”

I may or may not have gulped. Lisa, meanwhile, gagged a little bit. “I’m never getting married,” she muttered, “you guys are sickening.”

“Oh, please.” I shuffled over to wrap my arms tight around one of hers and tilted my chin up onto her shoulder, “you know you love us.”

“Yeah,” Lisa glanced down at me. “Doesn’t mean you’re not being gross right now.”

Lisa was uncomfortable watching me with Len because it made her want something that she never thought she could have, but at this point she considered me her sister. That was good enough for me. “I got you something too,” I said. “I remember you told me your favorite book was  _Breakfast at Tiffany’s_  by Truman Capote, and that you were Audrey Hepburn for Halloween every year in junior high, so I found the late collector who owned the actual tiara she wore and bought it from her son for twice what it was worth.”

“Truman Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe to play Holly Golightly,” Lisa gave me a smile without any tint of saccharine, “and he said Paramount double-crossed him by casting Audrey Hepburn, but I love her.”

“I know.” I let go and flailed at the door. “I left the tiara on the coffee table because I’m not capable of carrying two presents at once today.”

Lisa put one arm loosely around my shoulders and tilted my face up with her other hand to kiss my cheek before she went inside. Len put his diamond back inside the box and tucked it into the crook of his arm. I shuffled into his personal space and pressed my whole body against his, standing on tiptoe unsteadily to kiss him. Len splayed his fingers over the hollow between my shoulder blades and made a hungry noise that furled up from low in his throat. I kissed the corner of his mouth before I lowered myself onto my heels. Len squeezed my shoulder and hunched to kiss my forehead. “I have no idea how I went so long without you,” he grinned down at me. “I’m actually really excited to see what it’s like being married to you when I’m not in jail and you’re not in a parallel universe.”

“Yeah,” I grinned back, “so am I.”

* * *

I had a misunderstanding with Len during the tree lighting ceremony later that night because he thought I asked him to go there so he could help Barry stop his fellow Rogues. I made a garbled noise in my throat because I hadn’t intended that at all. “I asked you to this because your grandfather used to take you when you were a kid and you loved it,” I told him. Lester had been pretty lucid when we visited him earlier, and he’d remembered me from the year before without much prompting from the framed polaroid in his room. It was a good day. “I don’t want you to be a hero if that’s not what you want.”

Len folded his arms. “It’s not,” he told me.

“Okay,” I retorted, “but I have to keep a promise I made to save a teenage girl tonight. I’m going to go do that,” I turned and looked at him over my shoulder, “so are you in or out?”

Len took my right hand in his left and intertwined our fingers. “I’m in,” he said with slow vehemence. “I’m all in, Mac.”

I texted Jay to get Lenore to wait for Zoom outside the breach he was going to use to dangle Jesse in front of her father like the illicium filament on an anglerfish. I waited until Zoom let Jesse go and siphoned a copious amount of energy from him before I zapped him back through the breach from whence he came. It hurt to consume so much of the speed force all at once. I ended up holding onto my cane with both hands and gasping for lack of air because I’d temporarily forgotten how to breathe. Len smoothed his palm along my spine through my dress and hissed at the static generated by his touch, but he didn’t take his hand off me.

“Well,” I quipped and shuddered, “that actually went better than I thought.”

Jesse sobbed and clung to Harry, who looked at me like I really was a goddess after all before he focused on his daughter.

“Let’s go,” I said. Lenore wouldn’t be able to distract Zoom for long. “Jesse should probably stay at our place,” I told Harry. “I know you’ve been sleeping at S. T. A. R. Labs, but Zoom got in through the portal in the basement. Jesse won’t be safe there.”

Harry nodded and echoed what I’d said. “Let’s go.”

“Mac,” Len side-eyed me as he backed onto the road. “Why do you keep inviting people into our home?”

“Louise is your sister,” I pointed out.

“Louise will be going back to CCU in a week,” Len retorted. “It’s not my long-lost baby sister I’m worried about. It’s the woman you traveled back in time to save whose ex-fiancée shrunk himself like the plot of a bad nineties movie franchise and the mad scientist from a parallel universe—”

“I’m from a parallel universe,” I told him with a thread of indignation.

“Technically you’re from the future,” Len said in his smoothest voice, “but let’s not argue semantics. These people aren’t our problem—”

“Yes they are,” I snapped at him as we pulled up in front of the house. “Zoom was keeping Jesse in a cage. She’s nineteen, the same age as Louise. She deserved better. I could give her better, so I did.” Len said nothing, so I kept talking. “I’m not asking you to be a hero, but that doesn’t change what I am. I’m a heroine with or without you. I saved Bea twice. I retconned Anna out of being stuffed in a figural refrigerator. I kept Zoom from dragging Barry all over the city while he was paralyzed. I’ve been doing volunteer work as Lady Zeus all over the city since Iris interviewed me for C. C. P. N. I started a hashtag on Twitter to change the perception of metahumans in the media. I fought a four thousand year old immortal psychopath and I only survived because of that mad scientist and a serum he invented. If nothing else, you owe him one for saving my life.”

Len clenched his jaw around a disgruntled noise. “This changes things,” he said.

I’d upset him. Whoops. “It doesn’t have to,” I told him softly. “I’m not asking you to change for me.”

“That isn’t the problem.” Len reached over the gearshift and cupped my face as gently as he knew how. “Things have changed for me because of you. I want things I didn’t want before. I want you every second of every day. I don’t want you fighting sable speedsters or immortal psychopaths. I need you safe, Mac. I love you.”

“Don’t say that to manipulate me,” I warned him softly. “I’m more than just your wife.”

“Yeah,” Len stretched the short  _a_  sound out sullenly, “but do you have to be a hero?”

I giggled at how he spat the word out like gristle caught between his teeth. “I don’t know,” I said, “heroism doesn’t look the same for disabled people. I’m not like Barry. I can’t run around punching crime in the face every week, but I can pick my battles like I’ve been doing. I can volunteer my time as Lady Zeus and show the world that metahumans aren’t inherently evil by doing good. I can anonymously fund shelters and food banks and rape crisis hotlines and programs that help battered women get back on their feet. I can save girls who deserve better and protect the people I love. I’m not going to stop doing that.”

Len sighed, unclenching the line of his wide shoulders. “I meant what I said before,” he told me softly. “I will never stop loving you. No matter what happens. That hasn’t changed.”

I covered his hand with mine and kissed the fleshy part of his palm. “Okay.”

That’s when Harry knocked on the passenger side window. I may or may not have yelped. Len quit touching my face to unbuckle his seatbelt. I emerged from the passenger side and shuffled up onto the porch.

“Thank you,” Jesse smiled tentatively at me and I figured it was her way of trying not to cry because she was fed up with tears, “my dad told me you were planning to save me the whole time.”

“I sent people to find out where you were on Earth-2 in case my plan didn’t work,” I said, “but I knew where you would be tonight, so I thought I’d try my luck.”

I was freakishly lucky. I figured my luck was how the universe decided to compensate me for being a rape survivor and having a chronic illness. I didn’t believe in karma, not really, but something had to give.

I had bought a trundle bed for the spare room where Louise ended up staying. I had a trundle bed when I was younger, and it was lucky I’d gotten one, because it meant Louise didn’t have to leave the room and Jesse had somewhere to sleep that wasn’t the floor.

“You should come back to S. T. A. R. Labs with me,” Harry said. “You siphoned the speed force out of Zoom. There are tests we should run while it’s still in your system.”

“Ugh,” I groaned. I could feel the white hot lightning fizzing inside me, but I didn’t want to run tests with Harry. I wanted to take Len to bed and ride him so hard he forgot his own name.

“Mac isn’t going anywhere with you.” Len folded his arms. “I know you were there to betray the Flash. I’m not letting you do anything to her.”

“I saved her life,” Harry retorted.

“Thank you,” Len snarked back, “but that doesn’t mean you get to use her as a lab rat.”

I sighed. “I’m not running tests,” I told Harry with a yawn, “not tonight. I’m exhausted and I want to go to bed with my husband. I totally deserve cuddles for fighting Zoom and winning again.”

Harry snorted. “Captain Cold cuddles?”

Len cocked his head and smirked. “Mac keeps me nice and warm,” he said in a voice that oozed with innuendo. I blushed and glanced apologetically at Jesse. I had no idea why he was acting so weird.

Harry gave me a smile with something gentle lurking at the corners. “Mac is a good woman,” he said in such a sincere voice my lips gaped open in shock, “you’re lucky to have her.”

Len unfolded his arms to smooth one hand along my spine through my dress. “Yeah,” he said in that low voice, “she’s  _very_  good.”

I felt a jolt of pleasure unfurl below my belly. “Okay!” my voice pitched higher on the  _y_ sound because I was embarrassed. “Jesse, the guestroom is through the second door on the right. Harry, you’re welcome to sleep on the couch. Len, cool it with the innuendo or we’re not having sex tonight.”

I ruined any semblance of authority I had when I yawned long and loudly after that, but I digress.

Harry and Jesse sat around the Christmas tree and celebrated with hot cocoa and sugar cookies. I suggested they go to the party at the West house, but they wanted to celebrate by themselves because that had been their tradition since her mother died.

Len closed our bedroom door behind him before I climbed him like a tree. I kissed his jawline, the hollow under his jawbone, and down along the line of his neck to his throat. Len moaned for me and curled his fingers into my thighs hard enough to bruise. I dug my fingers into the nape of his neck and nipped his collarbone. Len pinned me against the door and fisted one hand in my hair to kiss me like he wanted to inhale me, like I had become the oxygen he needed to survive. I cupped his face and hooked my legs around his waist, my toes curling under the sheer fabric of my stockings as I kissed him back. Len made a raw noise in his throat and used his hips to hold me against the door while he broke the kiss to yank my dress over my head. I tugged on his shirt and he took it off before he kissed me again, softly.

“I just can’t get enough of you,” Len murmured as he smoothed one hand up my thigh and tweaked one of the straps attached to my stockings. “Well, well, well,” he smirked at me, “garters, hmm?”

I held his gaze and slowly ground myself against him through his pants. “Merry Christmas,” I deadpanned.

Len smirked wider and carried me over to our unmade bed. Then he dropped his pants and tilted his head to watch me take off my panties. I always wore my underwear on top of my garter belts so I could do my lady business without having to unfasten the garter straps. I was super lazy, pun unintended. Len made a low, appreciative noise and crawled up over my body to cup my breasts through my bra. “I want to bite you,” he said in his smoothest voice. That was his way of asking permission.

“Okay,” I said, “where?”

Len flicked his tongue over where my left breast met the cup of my bra. “What about here?”

That’s when something occurred to me. Len acted really weird before when Harry was looking at me. Harry wasn’t interested in me as anything more than someone who promised to save his daughter and kept her word, but this didn’t change the fact that Len was a possessive loser. “Why?” I asked. “Why do you want to bite me? Is it because you like using your teeth on me, or because it’s classier than marking your territory another way?”

Len sighed. “I do want the whole world to know you’re mine,” he told me, “but that’s not what the biting is about. I like knowing you’re going to feel me for days after I use my teeth on you. No one is going to see my mark if I bite you here,” he stroked one fingertip along the top of my breast, following the neckline of my bra with intent. “No one else but me. I marked my territory when I married you.” I arched my eyebrows at him and his jaw clenched. “That’s not why I proposed,” he clarified, “but you know you don’t notice when other men are interested in you.”

That was true. Cat used to watch boys flirt with me and tell me how oblivious I was afterward between fits of giggles. “I only noticed you were interested because you grabbed my ass when we first met,” I booped his nose, “there’s really no other way to take an opening move like that.”

Len gave my ass a gentle squeeze before he dragged his palm along my thigh and hooked my leg around his waist. “It’s a great ass,” he told me in a voice caught somewhere between smooth and sincere.

I rolled my eyes at him. “Okay,” I stroked his short hair and curled my fingers against the back of his head through its texture, “bite me.”

That’s when he sank his teeth into the flesh of my breast and slipped his other hand between my thighs. Len moaned with his mouth full after he felt how soaked I was. I squirmed and clutched at his head when he slid one finger all the way inside me. Len flicked my clit gently with his thumb, augmenting the pleasure to compensate for causing me pain.

Here’s the thing: I wasn’t a fan of pain, but this was different than chronic pain. It was sharper, and more fleeting. I didn’t mind being marked. I was klutzy and I bruised easily, so I got used to carrying the dull, twinging ache of contusions around long before I was diagnosed with RA. I could take whatever he wanted to give me. I also liked having control over the sharper kind of pain because I had no control over anything else going on inside my body. That’s what I got from his biting kink, and it was enough to make it consensual and good for both of us.

Len quit biting me and licked and sucked the skin he used his teeth on while he fucked me gently with his fingers. I came after he tugged the silk cup of my bra down and flicked his tongue over my nipple the same way he flicked his thumb over my clit. “Mac,” he cupped my face in his other hand and I opened my eyes to look at him before he asked, “you liked that, hmm?”

I nodded once, slowly. “Yes,” I told him. “I love you.”

“I love you too.” Len sucked my slick from his fingers. I took advantage of him kneeling between my legs and pinned him down. Len chuckled, a delighted flare of sound, before he curled his fingers into my hips through my garter belt and stroked my heraldic lion tattoo with his thumb.

I moved over him so the head of his cock slipped inside me. “I want you,” I told him softly.

Len hissed at the sensation and grinned wide, showcasing his teeth. “I want you too,” he told me with a thread of raw need. “Now take what we both want, Mac.”

I held his gaze and took all of him inside me until our hips met. Len said my name and started to move under me until our bodies settled into a rhythm like a pendulum, slow and sweet and sure. I wasn’t in total control because he kept his knees bent for leverage, but he rose to meet me while I took charge and rode him. It was a new kind of sex for us after how quick the conjugal visits were and the frenzy of the night before. I cupped my breasts and teased my own nipples through silky fabric because I still had my bra on. Len groaned and I felt his cock twitch from the inside.

“Oh,” I gasped, “I think you just got harder.”

“Well,” Len grinned and thrust up into my slick heat, “you do look really good riding me, Mrs. Snart.”

I was more than just his wife, but I loved that I could take him like I took his name. I pressed one hand flat against his chest and slid my other hand down between my legs to zap my clit. I came all over his cock after a few jolts of electricity from my fingertips and he felt it all because he was inside me. Len moaned and dug his fingers into my hips before he came too. I sat on him while his cock went soft inside me and blushed at the sight of his open mouth, his slack jaw. I had no idea why that in particular did it for me, but it did.

I was still wearing my stockings and garters, and they’d gotten all gross and sticky from my sweat and other things. I crawled to the nightstand to clean up the mess and take off my hosiery while my legs shook. There was an angry red groove in the flesh of my waist from the garter belt. I sighed and swept my sweaty bangs off my forehead. I unhooked my bra, wincing at how long it took because my arthritic wrist had been permanently immobilized, and turned back to look at Len.

There he was, naked; his whole body slick with sweat, his cock flaccid but still wet from his come and my arousal. I blushed at the look in his eyes, the lust and love in the way his gaze lingered all over me before he met my eyes and smiled. I took off my glasses before I crawled over to nuzzle his nose with mine. Len held me close and stole a kiss while our legs intertwined and my breasts squished against his chest. I reached down to yank the blankets up over us. Len smoothed one hand along my spine and kissed my forehead. “Now tell me about Vandal Savage,” he murmured. “We didn’t get around to having this conversation yesterday, but…” he looked over my head at the clock on the nightstand. “Now yesterday is tomorrow and I need to know.”

“No spoilers,” I told him with a yawn. “I want you to make up your own mind later. Don’t worry, though.” I kissed the clench in his jawline. “It’s going to be legendary.”

(Wait for it.)

* * *

**Scene IV**  
Crossing the Second Threshold 

* * *

Anna told me later that Ray came to find her because Zinda Blake fell through a tear in spacetime from 1959 and ended up in present day Star City.16 Apparently it was my fault because saving Anna had caused a temporal anomaly that had spat out Zinda, whom Laurel had adopted.

I may or may not have squee’d at the antecedent to the Birds of Prey. “Worth it,” I deadpanned.

Anna sighed and slumped onto my couch. “I got a job offer from Mercury Labs,” she told me. “Apparently there was a break-in and something called the speed cannon was stolen, so Dr. McGee wants a complete systems overhaul and a full-time systems manager after that. Ray said I should take it.”

That was Harry’s fault. I sighed because he could’ve probably built that MacGuffin himself, but I was married to a world class thief, so I wasn’t going to throw stones in glass houses.17 “Ray is going away for a while,” I told her. “I don’t think he knows it yet, but I don’t think you should plan your life around him either. No matter what happens, you deserve to have a future of your own. I do think you should work at S. T. A. R. Labs, though. Cisco became their systems manager by default after the particle accelerator explosion, but he’s an electrical engineer, not a systems engineer, and since you overhauled the system for Team Arrow, you could do a lot of good as part of Team Flash. Atomica doesn’t have to be dead anymore,” I smiled at her, “even if she’s not with the Atom.”

Anna was Atomica in this universe before Ray became the Atom, and he’d actually chosen the initialism that denoted his exosuit because of her. I figured they’d always love each other, even if they were never ever getting back together. Like, ever.18 Anna loved Ray, but that didn’t mean she had to wait around for him to get his shit together.

“S. T. A. R. Labs is hiring?” Anna wondered.

“I’m Lady Zeus and I know the Flash,” I told her. “S. T. A. R. Labs is hiring you. If you want.”

Anna smiled back. “What the hell,” she tapped her fingers in a golden ratio of staccato on the coffee table, “if I’m working for metahumans I can do the demigoddess thing without freaking my coworkers out.”

That’s how Anna ended up working at S. T. A. R. Labs as one of three people officially employed there. Cisco and Caitlin were the other two. Barry and Joe had jobs at the C. C. P. D., Iris worked for C. C. P. N., Jay probably had a job here since he’d lived on Earth-1 for half a year without a way back to Earth-2, and we couldn’t put Harry on the payroll because he didn’t technically exist here except as a posthumously convicted murderer.

Jesse wanted to help her father, but everyone agreed it wouldn’t safe for her at S. T. A. R. Labs until we closed the breaches and defeated Zoom for good. Louise offered to take Jesse to audit classes with her at C. C. U. over winter quarter, because she could ostensibly put Zoom on ice if and when he threatened us again. Harry refused, but Jesse was nineteen and capable of making her own choices, and he folded up like a cheap suit to make his daughter happy.

I felt Zoom come through one of the breaches while the rest of Team Flash was dealing with Russell Glosson. I’d become more attuned to the sable speedster after siphoning the speed force out of him a second time, but there were two more changes to his modus operandi. One, he was coming for Jesse in broad daylight. Zoom had always shown up at night before, like villains did, because appearing under the cover of darkness was a basic intimidation tactic. On a primeval level, everyone was scared of the dark. Two, he was slower than he’d been. I’d made him slower.

“Mac?” Len waved one hand in front of my face because my eyes had gone out of focus during a conversation about how stealing things with monetary value made him a better thief than the Turtle, who only stole things with sentimental value. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Zoom,” I said, “he’s back. I need Shawna.”

That’s how Len called Lisa, who texted Shawna, who teleported into our kitchen. I had no idea how Shawna knew where to poof, but I didn’t care. Lisa told me later that she’d hung out with Shawna and Brie at the house when I was on Earth-33. I would’ve been mad, except I was happy. Lisa had friends, and my house felt like home to her. That was progress.

Shawna offered me her arm, incongruously chivalrous, and I tucked my bad hand in the crook of her elbow. Len took her other arm, but she shrugged him off because she could only teleport one person at a time. There was still no time to argue, no time to put on the suit Cisco had made for me. I turned my engagement ring to hide the diamond in between my knuckle and palm and hoped the mask would be enough. Len wasn’t wearing his parka, either, but he’d put on his goggles and strapped the cold gun to his thigh.

Shawna had gone to CCU as a nursing major, which was how she knew where to leave us. There were people dead on the pavement, three that I could see, probably more. All with broken necks.

“I need Bea,” I told Shawna after she took Jesse back to the house for me. “I don’t expect you to fight, but please go and get her.”

Louise had outed herself as Ice to protect her girlfriend, freezing the ground and fountain in the quad while he tried to run on the frozen surface. Zoom shattered the frost creeping up his legs, but then Len shot him in the chest and knocked him down. Louise iced him over while he struggled and threw off blue sparks; she wasn’t fast enough to keep him down, but I was—in the immortal words of Carl Douglas—fast as lightning.19

Shawna reappeared with Bea and disappeared again. I didn’t blame her. Zoom was terrifying. I turned to zap him and he was gone. Apparently without Jesse as his prize, he had no reason to stay and fight us.

“Welp,” Bea huffed and popped the _p_ sound. “That was anticlimactic.”

“He’s desperate,” Len told her. “He probably needed Jesse as part of his plan to get at the Flash. He got sloppy, and we got lucky.”

“Shut your face,” I told him, even though I knew he wasn’t wrong.

Len shrugged and holstered his cold gun. “Make me,” he said in that low, intimate voice.

I shook my head slowly. “Sorry,” I stretched the _y_ sound out awkwardly. “Lady Zeus doesn’t kiss Captain Cold.”

Len didn’t bother to poke holes in my obviously flawed logic. Instead he drove me and Louise home in the car I’d bought for her. Shawna was still with Jesse when we got back to the house. Apparently she calmed her down by telling her about the pipeline. Jesse had thought no one would get what had happened to her, which was why she had thrown herself into something with Louise instead of dealing with her trauma; it wasn’t the healthiest choice, but it worked for them until Louise couldn’t give Jesse what she needed. Shawna got it. Jesse needed that.

That’s how Shawna ended up staying for dinner. Also, how I learned she’d taken care of her father until he died of Huntingtin’s disease when she was nineteen. Shawna was a nurse practitioner before she met Clay in the emergency room at St. Andrews and lost her job after they got mixed up with a mobster named Martin Stockheimer.

I redrew the parallels between Shawna being imprisoned at S. T. A. R. Labs and Jesse living in a cage instead of helping my team deal with the Turtle. I figured they could handle themselves while I got over my rage.

I acquired the Naydel Library while Barry saved Patty. Its previous owner had been one of the seventeen people who died in the particle accelerator explosion. That’s why it had closed down—it had been foreclosed, so I bought it from the bank. Len wanted to burgle the library, which was chock-full of rare texts and other antiquities worth a fortune, but he backed off when I told him that I wanted to buy it.

I knew Harry was going to kill the Turtle after he was locked away in the pipeline, but he was going to use what he got from the Turtle to defeat Zoom, so I didn’t stop him. Also, the Turtle had killed his wife and kept her corpse like a trophy in a glass case. I figured he deserved to die.

I wasn’t the kind of heroine who lost sleep over dudes that murdered the women they claimed to love.

“So,” I peeked over my shoulder at him as I washed a pan in the sink, “are you mad?”

“Nah.” Len came up behind me and put one hand on my shoulder. “Wasn’t much of a challenge, anyway.”

That’s when he slipped his other hand under my skirt and into my panties, so I didn’t question his lack of interest in such an easy target. I flailed awkwardly, my hands too wet and soapy to give me any traction at the edge of the sink, and dried them off to avoid inducing electrolysis while he was holding me where he wanted me. Len smoothed the hand on my shoulder along the curve of my neck and tilted my head up to kiss me hard. I reached back to dig my fingers into the nape of his neck.

Len slipped one long finger into me and swirled it, making a tight circle. I moaned into his mouth, the high noise working its way out from my throat, and shifted my hips to get more friction. Len caressed my jawline with his thumb and licked into my mouth, his tongue curling around mine while his fingertip rubbed a place inside me that jolted my whole body. I flicked my tongue under his, making a literal spark between us.

That’s when Louise made a disgusted noise from the archway that led into the kitchen. “Seriously?” she deadpanned, because at this point she wasn’t surprised by all the sex we were having, but it still wasn’t something she wanted to see firsthand—pun unintended. Whoops.

I broke the kiss and exhaled a soft whoosh of air. “It’s my kitchen,” I retorted, “and I’ll get fucked in here if I want to.”

“Yeah.” Len kept moving his finger until I tugged my bottom lip between my teeth to stifle another moan. I could hear the smirk in his voice when he spoke. “What she said.”

Louise clenched her teeth around a disgruntled noise and made a tactical retreat into the guestroom.

Len kissed my neck and scraped his teeth over the skin where my pulse jumped underneath. “Where were we?” he asked in that low, intimate voice. “Let’s see,” he worked another finger into me and crooked them to hit my g-spot again, “how about here?”

I made another high noise that I muffled with my other hand. “Len,” I whispered and squirmed when the heel of his hand ground against my clit.

“Yes?” he murmured into my ear.

That’s when I came and clenched tight around his fingers. Apparently his voice pushed me over the edge. I would’ve been embarrassed by that, but it felt too good. I shuddered as he slipped his fingers out of me and moaned again when I heard him suck the slick off them.

“Okay,” I oozed against the counter and exhaled a soft happy sigh. “I don’t think I can stand up anymore.”

Len chuckled, delighted. “Good,” he told me smugly.

“Ugh!” I rolled my eyes at him until he scooped me up and took me to bed.

It was a truth multiversally acknowledged that I loved him way too much.

* * *

It took me an embarrassingly long time to meet Gideon face to face. There was a part of me that was avoiding xyr. I had so many questions about the person I used to be, and I didn’t know whether or not I wanted to know the answers. I was paradoxical that way.

Then I noticed Cisco was making a weird face after he touched my shoulder one time, and when I called him on it, he confided that he’d been having vibe-y visions of what I called the antecedent timeline: the precursor to our current timeline. Or, the one in which I was Rose instead of, well, me.

Eobard had returned to present day Central City. If this version of the Reverse-Flash was stalking Barry, it was only a matter of time before he saw me. That was enough to make me bite the bullet.

I squared my shoulders and shuffled into the Time Vault with the braille on the walls and a yellow suit in its glass case. I could feel the energy that Gideon was made of, xyr strange interface buzzing softly in the walls, and it was nice to know I wasn’t alone.

“Hi,” I said. “Gideon, my name is—”

Gideon corporealized in front of me. “I know who you are,” xe said. “Mackenzie Snart, a.k.a. Lady Zeus. Wife of Leonard Snart, a.k.a. Captain Cold. Mother of Malcolm Snart, a.k.a. Voltage, and Zenobia Snart, a.k.a. Frostbite. S. T. A. R. Labs Records Manager, Archivist at the Flash Museum, and owner of the Naydel Library. Founding member of the Lightning Brigade and the Justice League of America—”

“Okay,” I held up one hand to stop xyr. “No more spoilers. I want to know about Rose.”

Gideon nodded and smiled. “Rose Russell was a reporter for _Central City Science Today_ who interviewed Eobard Thawne—a.k.a. Professor Zoom a.k.a. Reverse-Flash—when he worked at the Flash Museum. Born on July thirty-first in the year 2157 of the Common Era. Daughter of Eric Russell 20 and Bridget Russell, née Willis—”21

I held up one hand again. “I want to know about what Eobard did to Rose,” I specified. “I’d like to see it, actually, if it’s at all possible.”

That’s how I ended up watching three versions of myself on what Gideon called xyr memory-screen. The one who had a fiancée when she met Eobard. The one whose boyfriends were all murdered by him. The one whom he rendered mute as a child.

The one who killed herself.

I watched myself die, okay? I watched a girl whose face was my face use her powers to blow her own head off. Literally.

I had a panic attack while Gideon watched me curiously, not maliciously, and thanked xyr before I shuffled out into the hallway.

Harry was there when I emerged. “Mac,” his face pinched awkwardly when he saw my face, “you’re crying.”

I hadn’t realized. I reached up and touched my face to feel the falling tears. “Oh,” I whispered. “I totally am. Sorry.”

“Why?” Harry asked.

I arched my eyebrows at him. “Why am I sorry?”

“No.” Harry shook his head and folded his arms. “Why are you crying?”

“I died,” I told him softly. “I watched myself die. It’s the second time I’ve died. I have no idea how to feel about that.”

Harry frowned. “Yeah, I got none of that.”

I exhaled with enough force to flap my lips. “It’s a long story,” I said, “basically: your Earth-1 counterpart was murdered and bodysnatched by a speedster who loved me psychotically. I watched myself die in the version of reality that Barry prevented when he saved me from the Reverse-Flash, who created this version of reality when he murdered Barry’s mother. I read the issue of the comics with his backstory when it came out in 2011 on Earth-33, but I didn’t take it personally until I knew it was also a story about me. I guess seeing it now that I know it’s about me was different than reading it when I had no idea,” I sighed at how discombobulated my exposition sounded and gnawed on the inside of my cheek, “does that make sense?”

“It does.” Harry fiddled with the outer rim of his glasses and cocked his head, thoughtful. “It sounds—what’s the word you always use?—terribad.”

I giggled. I couldn’t help it! “Don’t worry,” I told him, “Eobard didn’t have your face when he traumatized me. I’m not going to look at you like you’re my worst nightmare.”

“Oh.” Harry permitted one corner of his mouth to creep up into a tiny smile. “Good.”

I smiled back, showing my slightly crooked teeth without making eye contact. That’s when my phone buzzed. Bea texted to ask if I’d be the designated driver for a girls’ night out with her, Lisa, Shawna, and Brie. Apparently the mad scientist and the teleporter were dating. Which was awesome. I didn’t mind being the designated driver. It made sense, because I couldn’t drink alcohol for medical reasons anyway, so this way everybody won. I texted back to ask if I could invite Anna. Bea said yes, in the form of a thumbs up emoji, so I texted Anna to come unarmed to a secret location. Anna texted back a sword emoji, which I took to mean she would come armed if that suited her. I texted her a shruggie in response.

Harry was halfway down the hallway when I looked up from my phone. I shrugged for real and went in the opposite direction, bouncing a little bit, getting myself excited about girls’ night. After all, if there was ever a night when I needed to drive myself to distraction, this was totally it.

Here’s the thing: when I lived on Earth-33, my girls’ nights involved me, Cat, Kat, and Nicole watching a movie or episodes of some TV show together with copious amounts of junk food. I’d make my signature cocktail—pink lemonade with champagne, whipped cream, and strawberries—because that was before I was on paroxetine, so I could get my drink on. Cat always had wine and Nicole always had beer, while Kat and I drank my pink concoction. Kat would make her specialty popcorn: butter and salt and pepper and shredded white cheddar cheese. Nicole won every impromptu belching contest and mocked our weak attempts to outdo her. Cat would forget to take her Lactaid pills and make herself sick eating ice cream. Sometimes we’d go to Barnes & Noble before the viewing and drinking portion of girls’ night and we’d read the synopses on the backs of bad romance novels out loud. Or we’d play a game I invented where we’d say the lyrics of pop songs out loud in a monotone, because they sounded hilarious that way. These were things I also did when I was depressed. It made me laugh, okay? Don’t judge me.

I missed my friends on Earth-33, but that didn’t mean I loved my friends on Earth-1 any less. That said, girls’ night with Lisa and Bea was nothing like the girls’ nights I was used to. It was ladies’ night at the bar, so all the drinks had been temporarily renamed things like Tequila Patriarchy Smasher, Manhatin’, Intersectionality on the Beach, and my favorite: Rusty Nail Whomever You Want.22 I was a slut for correct grammar. It was embarrassing.

I tucked one of the menus into my purse as a keepsake and made everyone give me their keys. I’d borrowed the S. T. A. R. Labs designated stakeout van so I could fit everybody in one car at the end of the night. Lisa dragged me up on a table with her at one point. I’d never danced on a table before, and it was probably not as fun sober as it would’ve been if I were drunk, but Lisa burst out laughing and buried her chortles in my hair. That alone was worth the anxiety I felt, being the center of attention. I used my powers to keep the people filming us from getting anything but static in their footage, though. I didn’t want a video titled “Golden Glider Gone Wild” to end up on YouTube. Lisa probably would’ve loved it, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

I got home sometime past three in the morning. It was actually the first time I’d gotten home to find Len asleep instead of the other way around. I took a shower to wash off all the sweat I’d worked up and crawled into bed with him in the aftermath, my hair wet, my body dry, my brain overloaded.

Len slept lightly, and he woke up when the mattress compressed under my weight. “Hey,” he said in that low voice I loved.

“Hi,” I wriggled closer and kissed the corner of his mouth before I whispered, “go back to sleep.”

“Nah.” Len gave me a tiny smile and smoothed one hand up from my hip, his palm lingering along my spine before his fingers curled into my wet hair. “You missed, Mac.”

I rolled my eyes and kissed his lips, cupping his face and taking my time to make the kiss a good one. “I’m too exhausted to have sex again,” I told him after he broke the kiss to nip my jaw. Things had been heated since the night before Christmas, and I was a little bit sore after how rough he was that morning. I’d liked it—hell, I’d explicitly asked for it—but I didn’t have the energy for another round. I’d come six times. That was more consecutive orgasms than I’d ever had before, so I was still fucked out.

Len snaked his other arm underneath me and pulled my body on top of his. I felt him half-hard against the crease of my thigh, but he didn’t push his luck. Instead, he kissed my forehead and held me while we both fell back to sleep. That was good enough for me.

* * *

After the whole Zinda thing, I asked Saf whether she was able to sense disturbances in the _dào_. I doubted it was an isolated incident and I figured holes in spacetime were a thing we needed to monitor. I didn’t blame her, though. It wasn’t her fault. Not at all. After all, nobody knew exactly how superpowers worked. Not even a genre-savvy comic book geek like me.

“I don’t know.” Saf held up her hands and shrugged exaggeratedly, her inner thespian showing. “I’ve never tried.”

Apparently she could, because we spent the week tracking the temporal abnormalities in the city. Cisco tagged along with a tachyon detector and Caitlin drove the stakeout van. I brought case files that Barry had stolen from the C. C. P. D.—the ones I’d organized in the bowels of S. T. A. R. Labs—that could’ve been origin stories for characters from the comics. I had no idea if the _dào_ had spat other metahumans out into our timeline before the particle accelerator explosion, or whether they had active metagenes before the particle accelerator exploded, like Simmons. I figured they could tell us, either way.

Ben Kruller, a man charged with multiple homicides who’d slipped through the cracks of the justice system, had died of mysterious burns consistent with a kinetic energy blast. I found old security camera footage and identified a man working as a doctor under the alias Jonathan Carmichael. Luna had constructed his fake identity the same way she had created mine. I’d marked the file because Jonathan Carmichael was an alias used by Joshua Clay, a member of the Doom Patrol in the comics and a metahuman whose powers included flight and kinetic energy projection.23

Arani Desai24 and Rhea Jones25—two other members of the Doom Patrol in the comics—were living together. I was aware of Rhea because she was magnetokinetic, and it hurt to get close to her because our powers were polarized, which caused electromagnetic waves to refract and short out every single piece of technology within a ten mile radius. Rhea wasn’t a technopath, so I had to power through a migraine and turn it all back on.

Penny van Camp had fallen through spacetime and gotten a job as a nurse at the hospital where Shawna used to work.26 Laurel told me later over Skype that Zinda had kissed Penny at the train station after she arrived in Star City, like a lesbian homage to “V-J Day in Times Square” but without the sexual assault implied by the photographer in his description of his iconic photograph.27

Ivana Christina Borodin Molotova, a.k.a. Christina Alexandrova, had been hit by the same lightning that struck Barry, and she was still comatose when we found her.28 I learned from her chart that she’d gone through withdrawal from a drug the toxicologists who ran her screen couldn’t identify and she’d almost stroked out. It was a miracle she hadn’t been rendered brain dead. I thought about zapping her, troubleshooting like I had with Bea. I decided not to shock her system because the Soviet version of Lady Flash was obsessed with Vandal Savage in the comics, but more on that later.

I kept Barry from putting them in the pipeline. Joshua had killed a mass murderer after the charges against him hadn’t stuck, neither Arani nor Rhea had hurt or killed anyone that we knew of, and Penny was a nurse attached to the Blackhawk Squadron in the past who’d never hurt anyone in the present.

I’d convinced Team Flash to give other metahumans the benefit of the doubt. That was progress.

* * *

**Scene V**  
Master of Two Worlds 

* * *

William Clayton—Oliver’s illegitimate son—had action figures of the Flash and Captain Cold, which existed on Earth-33 as toys released as DC collectibles, but their existence in this universe had another kettle of implications. I asked Len about it when he was in prison, and he told me various companies like Funko and Mattel were transferring royalties from those action figures into one of his offshore accounts, which became joint accounts when we got married. Apparently that was a thing he did when I was on Earth-33.

I asked Barry about his action figures and he told me that he wasn’t getting any royalties from toy companies or Jitters or anyone because while everyone knew Leonard Snart was Captain Cold—because my melodramatic hoodlum of a husband broadcasted his identity to the world when he called Barry out—the world at large didn’t know Barry Allen was the Flash.

I groaned internally, I groaned externally, I groaned eternally. Then something else occurred to me. “Barry,” I flailed one hand and held my cane in the other, “how is S. T. A. R. Labs financed?”

“Um,” said Barry, “Reverse-Flash had a lot of money, and he left everything to me before he died for some reason. Which doesn’t make any sense because he wanted to kill me, but nothing he ever did made any sense to me, so I just rolled with it.”

“Yeah,” I retorted. “I got that, but whatever money you inherited from Eobard is finite. Caitlin and Cisco have real jobs here so they should be getting paid every week for being your sidekicks, the building itself needs to be maintained—seriously, who is cleaning this place?—and I’m assuming he covered your astronomical food expenses when he was alive because there’s no way you can afford to eat the way you must with your hypermetabolism otherwise, so where is the money coming from?”

This, by the way, was the conversation that inspired Cisco to declare me the overthinking champion of the multiverse and give me a little plastic trophy full of M&Ms, but that was neither here nor there.

“Um,” said Barry, “I have no idea.”

I made a garbled noise in the back of my throat. I kept making garbage disposal sounds until he asked me to stop. “Okay,” I said, “you need to get an accountant to sort out your finances, and then you need to plan a budget that includes their salaries and mine—”

“Wait,” Barry raised his eyebrows at me, “since when am I paying you?”

“Well, you wouldn’t be.” I rolled my bad ankle to pop my arthritic joint and exhaled a puff of laughter when Barry winced at the noise. “I basically have infinite money because of my powers. Which is awesome. I know they say money can’t buy happiness, but anyone who says that is wrong. I’m definitely much happier when I can afford my meds and clothes and books and whatnot. I’m offering to fund S. T. A. R. Labs with my infinite money, if you give me a budget so I can figure out exactly how much it would cost, but I would put myself on the payroll on paper because it would explain why I hang out here every day without giving away my secret identity or yours.”

Barry was gobsmacked at this point, but he rolled with it. “Why do I need an accountant if you know how to handle a budget?” he asked.

“Because,” I stretched the  _uh_  sound out awkwardly. “I doubt you know how to figure out S. T. A. R. Labs’ finances by yourself and I’m too busy to walk you through it, figuratively speaking. Now if you’ll excuse me,” I held up the soda I had been drinking, “I just realized this bottle has ‘share a Coke with a Captain’ on it, and I have to go make Len wear his Captain Cold outfit so I can take an embarrassing selfie of us doing what the bottle says. Don’t judge me,” I shuffled to the elevator and waved as the sliding doors opened for me, “bye.”

Len indulged me after I got home because I promised to suck his brain out through his dick. I knew he would’ve done it without a blowjob as incentive because he liked making me happy—but I liked sucking his cock, so this way everybody won. I snapped the picture before I undressed and got on my knees for him in our kitchen.

I slinked the fingertips of one hand along his perineum while I licked my way up and down his shaft and rubbed slow circles over his asshole with one finger. Len moaned, his hands clutching in my hair as he thrust himself deeper into my mouth. I curled my tongue over the base of his cock a few times before I pulled back and focused on the head of him. Len hissed a soft  _yes_  when I slipped one finger—wet from my own cunt because I was using that slick instead of lubricant—inside him. I crooked it slowly, then swirled a tight circle, working him open until he got incoherent around my finger and came inside my mouth.

Len didn’t go soft after he came. I swallowed his come and let him slip out of my mouth with a slick, wet sound. Len exhaled sharply and I felt his whole body clench. I looked up at him, held his gaze, and licked his cock from root to tip while I crooked my finger again. Len fisted his hand tight in my hair as he growled a raw, guttural noise that was probably my name. I’ll admit I was pleased with myself. I knew I could make him lose control, but I had never been in control, not this way. I was in control during sex in that my consent and whether or not it was good for me were super important to him, but I was always so lost to Len, in how it felt being with him. Doing this to him meant that he was totally lost in me, in a way he only got when he was inside me before. Does that make sense?

I wanted to fuck him. I wanted to spread his legs and look at his face while he took whatever I gave him gladly. I figured that was probably how he felt whenever he fucked me.

I took his tight, heavy sac into my mouth to lick and suck on that while I stroked his cock with one hand and fingered him with the other. Len came all over his bare torso with a harsh, desperate noise. I probably should’ve done something to keep him from making a mess. I settled for licking him clean meticulously while his chest heaved and he gasped for me.

“Mac,” Len said my name fervently and hunched to kiss my forehead, the arch of my eyebrow, the jut of my cheekbone, the corner of my lips. I figured he was using affection as positive reinforcement, not an end in itself, but it didn’t make me anxious. I knew he liked my face no matter what. “Who taught you that, hmm?” he asked.

I shrugged. “No one taught me that,” I told him, “I’ve never done it before. I do know what a prostate is, though, so I thought you might like it.”

Len smirked at me and raised his eyebrows suggestively. “Thought you didn’t do butt stuff.”

“I don’t do butt stuff that involves my ass,” I retorted, “but I want to do butt stuff to you. If you want. Cool?”

Len smirked wider. “Cool,” he murmured before he kissed me slick and filthy, like he wanted to eat me alive. Which was something he’d actually done, euphemistically, so I was flushed and throbbing with  _want_  when he moved his mouth to my neck. Len cupped my breasts and rubbed my nipples between his thumbs and forefingers slowly at first. I moaned when he tugged on them gently and felt his smile against my skin. “I love you,” he told me before he lifted my breasts and licked both my nipples at once.

“I…” he sucked my nipples into the heat of his mouth and I whimpered. “I love you too,” I told him softly.

Len crouched and mapped the familiar lightning strikes of my stretch marks with his lips and tongue. “I love how soft you are,” he told me while he worked my panties down my legs and swirled his thumb over the knob of my ankle before they ended up on the floor. “I love the way you taste,” he smirked and hooked my left knee over his shoulder, “and the way you say my name. I love how your glasses fog up when you come for me.”

“I love your eyes,” I told him. “I love the way you look at me, like you see me the way I wish I saw myself all the time. I love the way you move, your physicality, the strength in everything you do. I love how precise you are. I love the way you speak and the way you think—”

That’s when he spread me open and fucked me with his tongue. I dug my fingertips into the nape of his neck and moaned his name. Len flicked the flat of his tongue over my clit and worked two fingers inside me, stirring me up precisely until pleasure coiled and compacted low in my belly. I came so hard I squeaked a little bit. It was too soft to be a scream, but too shrill to be another moan. Len didn’t stop. Instead he sucked on my clit and fucked me with his fingers until he dragged a second coming out of me.

I felt my knees buckle and my legs suddenly gave out from under me. Len chuckled and stood to catch me before I puddled on the floor, a grin unfurling on his face while he gave me a little squeeze. “Cute,” he told me smugly, enunciating the consonant with a hint of teeth.

“Hng…” I made a disgruntled noise at how inarticulate he’d made me. I hated not being able to use my words.

Len cupped my face in one hand and kissed me softly. I nuzzled his nose with mine after he broke the kiss and felt him hard against the crease of my thigh.

“I don’t think my legs work,” I said, “but I’m game if you want to lift me onto the island and fuck me that way.”

“I like the way you think too.” Len stroked my cheekbone with his thumb and curled his fingertips against my neck. “I love how smart you are. I love the way you light up when you talk about what you love.”

That’s why I married him. I honestly never thought anyone would love me for my body and my brain, but Len did. I nipped his collarbone while he did what I said and lifted me onto the island in the middle of our kitchen. I laid back and spread my legs wide for him. Len smoothed his hands over my thighs into the hollows behind my knees and rubbed the hard length of his cock between my folds, teasing my clit with every stroke. I squirmed, but held his gaze while my cheeks flushed a brighter pink. “I love how smart you are too,” I told him. “I love how you use your hands to learn things by taking them apart. I love how I can feel you thinking when you touch me.”

Len changed the angle of his hips so the head of him slipped into my hole. I whimpered and shifted my hips in a futile attempt to get more friction. “I think you want me inside you, hmm?” he said in that low, intimate voice.

“Yes,” I said, “please.”

Len kept his eyes on my face as he thrust all the way inside me in one stroke. I moaned when he curled his fingers into the flesh of my waist and fucked me slowly, pulling out until only the head of his cock was inside me and slipping back in. Len hunched over my body to gently tug my nipple between his teeth and into the heat of his mouth. I stroked his short hair and said his name, my voice pitching higher when his thumb brushed sloppy circles over my clit. Len scraped his teeth over the pulse in my neck and took his time sucking a bruise into the skin there. I came and generated sparks from my palm against his chest. Len moaned and grabbed my hair to pull me into another filthy kiss, his tongue curling around mine while I clenched around his cock. I flicked my tongue over his, making literal electricity between us, and he came inside me with a raw moan. I swallowed that sound and broke the kiss while we both remembered how to breathe.

I caressed his back to feel the old slubs of scar tissue that marked his flesh and the sinuous muscle underneath his skin. Len settled back on his elbows with a grin and touched my hair. “This never gets old,” he told me softly. “I really can’t get enough of you.”

“I went to a parallel universe and then you were in jail,” I deadpanned. “I guess we’re making up for lost—” Len stole a kiss and stopped my mouth. “—time,” I huffed after he moved to nip my jaw.

“Sorry,” Len murmured before he gently bit my earlobe, “you were saying?”

I could feel my heartbeat thundering beneath my ribcage. I sighed, more content than anything else. “Well,” I stroked his hair while he nuzzled my neck, “technically we’ve only been sexually active with each other for less than a third of our relationship—” I felt his cock twitch and he was suddenly half-hard inside me where he’d been flaccid before. “—wow,” I looked down between our bodies even though I couldn’t actually see where they met in this position. “That’s soon.”

“That’s what our name means,” Len retorted smugly.

I rolled my eyes at him. “I don’t think our surname connotes stamina during sexytimes,” I told him, “the Swedish word ‘snart’ means ‘soon’ or ‘some odd-come-shortly,’ which denotes an unspecified time in the near future—”

Len tugged my nipple between his knuckles and teased my soft areola into a hard nub while I whimpered. “How do you know all that?” he asked.

“I like words,” I told him, “you married the weird girl who read the dictionary for pleasure as a kid.”

“What’s your favorite word, hmm?” Len rose until he stood over me and lifted my hips to change the angle of our bodies. I moved to sit up so my arms could go around his neck and slowly propped my feet on his shoulders, testing a theory. Len grinned and slipped out until only the head of his cock was left inside me.

I opened my mouth to answer his question. That’s when he thrust all the way into me, his cock thick and hard again. I yelped when he rubbed someplace inside that made me jolt sweetly. I wasn’t prepared for that, or how full I felt. “How are you deeper?” I asked breathlessly.

Len curled his fingers into the flesh of my waist as he pulled out slowly and thrust back in hard enough to make me bounce on the countertop a little bit. “Now tell me your favorite word,” he said in that low, intimate voice.

“Oh,” I gasped as his pubic bone met my clit and squirmed against him like a tectonic plate wishing for an earthquake, “sesquipedalian. It’s a big word,” I did something like a swirl with my hips to meet his next thrust and he moaned for me. “It also means ‘big word.’ It’s meta as hell.”

Len chuckled and I felt his cock twitch again from the inside. I started to move my hips against his to get more friction than he was giving me. Len splayed his fingers over the small of my back and hunched so my knees were hooked over his shoulders. I cupped his face in both of my hands and kissed him while he stirred me up with his cock. I moaned into his mouth and fell apart, my orgasm fizzing up through my belly and thighs until it popped and bubbled over. Len kissed my forehead. “Mac…” he groaned and buried my name in the hollow of my throat when he came.

I unhooked my knees from his shoulders and nuzzled his nose with mine. “Hi,” I whispered.

“Hi there,” Len whispered back.

“So,” I flopped onto my back and oozed like molasses over the countertop, “do you have a favorite word?”

Len nodded with a slight tilt of his head. “I like defenestration,” he said in his smoothest voice, “the act of throwing someone out the window. I threw Mick out a window once,” his mouth unfurled in a tiny smile at the memory. “Didn’t go so well for him, of course, but then he was on fire and there was snow on the ground. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Later he explained that he actually learned his favorite word from Mick in the aftermath of throwing him out the window, because they got into a drunken verbal altercation during which Mick yelled “YOU DEFENESTRATED ME!” before he explained what defenestration was. Anyhow.

“I am very attracted to you right now,” I told him.

“Really,” Len folded his arms and stepped back to case the mess he’d made between my thighs like it was a work of art. I flushed brighter than a soft afterglow under his scrutiny and he smirked. “I didn’t see that coming.”

I buried my face in both palms and groaned at his terribad pun until my legs worked again without aches or trembles. I kept one hand between my legs to keep his semen from dripping on the floor and stood on tiptoe to kiss his throat softly before I shuffled off to brush my teeth and take a quick shower. I was so fucked out I fell asleep with conditioner still in my hair after I had rinsed the soap off my body.

Len threw a washcloth at me and woke me up. Which may have sounded mean, but I’d conducted a current through the impurities in the water all over my naked body and induced electrolysis in my sleep. Which in turn meant I would’ve electrocuted him to death if he had tried putting his hands on me instead of using the washcloth to jolt me into waking. I liked the methodology that didn’t make me a widow.

This, by the way, was the reason why Len and I never showered or bathed together: because I worried I might electrocute him to death in the water. Yeah.

I flailed awkwardly in my shower chair, sleepy and discombobulated. Len chuckled while I squinted at him. “It was so good you passed out in the shower, hmm?” he asked smugly. I nodded and muffled a yawn in one palm. Len smiled without baring his teeth. “I’m going to shower now,” he told me, “and then I want to take a nap with you. Cool?”

“Cool.” I yawned again without bothering to cover my mouth and checked my hair for conditioner residue before I left our bathroom in a towel. I crawled into our bed and conked out while he was still in the shower. I woke up again in his arms.

“We should go,” Len murmured once he noticed I was awake.

“What?” I asked groggily. “Where?”

“Earth-33,” Len said, “to meet your family. We should go there before whatever thing you know is coming but refuse to tell me about happens.”

I turned to look at him over my shoulder. “Seriously?”

“Yeah.” Len nodded and idly stroked his cold fingertips over my belly. “I want to.”

That’s how we ended up going on, well, an interdimensional road trip. I worried that we might create more temporal anomalies, specifically interdimensional aberrations, but I was selfish enough to risk everything for a chance to see my family again. Don’t judge me.

Saf drove my car—the Mazda clunker I’d brought with me from Earth-33 when I returned—into the  _dào_  with me riding shotgun and a snit of Snarts in the backseat. I decided a “snit” was what a group of Snarts should be called. Like a murder of crows, or a parliament of owls, or an unkindness of ravens. I blamed the Trickster for putting the idea in my head. Len sat between his sisters in the middle of the backseat. I closed my eyes and made a futile effort to ignore my anxiety.

“Mac,” Saf booped my shoulder, “we’re here.”

I opened my eyes to check my phone, and it told me that it was July thirteenth, three days after I’d left three months earlier. I opened the passenger side door and saw my mother weeding the stone path surrounding the deck in her big floppy sun hat. I stepped onto the dry grass and swallowed thickly. “Mom,” I said.

Here’s the thing: my mom was a tiny woman—five-foot-three and ninety-five pounds soaking wet—but she was also a force of nature. No one upset my mom and lived to tell about it. No one refused her anything when she asked because she was a lethal combination of kindness and hardcore. I had grown up watching her do eight things at once, and when I couldn’t even do one thing at a time because I was disabled, I started to hate myself. Which wasn’t her fault, but it still made it hard to live in the same house with her.

It was never more obvious that I was adopted than whenever I stood next to her: a corpulent, bespectacled, grey-eyed brunette geek and a skinny, blonde, green-eyed Amazon warrior. It didn’t help that Ellie—my only niece, born a year and twenty-eight days after me—was the spitting image of my mom when she was younger. It also didn’t help that everyone kept telling me how much we didn’t look alike when I was a kid. None of that was her fault, but we were strikingly different people, and I’d thought our dissimilarities meant something was wrong with me when I was growing up. I had ninety-nine insecurities, and my mother was either directly or indirectly responsible for a significant amount of them.

I wasn’t thinking about that when I saw her. None of it. Instead the whole universe narrowed down to her straw hat and the wisps of gray hair underneath, to how wide her eyes got when she looked up and saw me, to how quickly tears formed in the crow’s feet worn into their corners by years and years of laughter.

I was crying too when she hugged me, her gloved hands smelling of freshly overturned earth, her skin a weird combination of sweat and baby powder with a whiff of apple shampoo. I ugly cried so hard we both ended up kneeling in the grass, because she couldn’t support my superior weight. “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I’m so sorry, Mom.”

While a few months had passed for me, only a few days had passed for my family on Earth-33, so my departure was still “I’ll forgive you,” she told me. “If you stay until the reunion is over.”

I sniffled. I had completely forgotten about the family reunion, which had been years in the making. There hadn’t been a reunion of the entire Lowell clan since the year after I was born, the year my Grandpa Ellis—whom my niece was named for—died. “Oh,” I looked over my shoulder at Saf, “would you mind?”

“Nope,” Saf grinned at me, “not as long as you’re paying for everything. I don’t make any money if I don’t see patients.”

“Well,” I made a futile attempt to extricate myself from my mom, “you won’t miss any treatments if we go back at the same moment we left.”

“Yeah!” Saf bounced a little bit. “I forgot about how convenient the  _dào_  can be.”

“Oh! Mom,” I flailed one hand at her. “This is Saffron Doyle, the alternate version of Senna from Earth-1.” I used my cane to get back on my feet before I gesticulated to the snit lurking beside my car. “This is my family. Lisa Snart and Louise Lincoln, my sisters, and Leonard Snart,” I smiled at him, “my husband.”

That’s when my mom practically stomped over to the car. Len towered over her by a foot in his boots, and his body was all lean muscle on a powerful frame, but his eyes widened and I knew he was a little bit scared of what she might do. At least she’d left her clippers in the bucket on the garden path.

Len held up his hands in mock surrender, and my mom hugged him. I giggled. I couldn’t help it! I hadn’t expected that, and neither had he.

“Welcome to the family,” my mom told him.

That’s when he belatedly hugged her back so gently I figured he was scared of breaking her. Like he could.

Saf nudged Lisa. “And his heart grew three sizes that day,” she whispered.29

Lisa snickered, a froth of curls flopping over her shoulder as she turned her face to muffle her laughter in her palm.

I shuffled around until I was behind him. “Quackenbush?” I asked my mom.

“Quackenbush,” my mom agreed with a nod.

Here’s the thing: quackenbushes were a torture device my family had invented before I was born. It was basically dry humping from two sides with a few grunts to punctuate the awkwardness. Yeah.

Len glanced over his shoulder at me in the aftermath, a nonverbal _what the hell was that?_ I nuzzled the hollow between his shoulder blades through his shirt. “Quackenbush,” I told him, “one of the many trademarks of the Lowell clan.” I made a mental note to keep my older brothers from giving him a tweakrumb or a cooshwah. Len probably wouldn’t handle a six-foot-four man with a potbelly swiping at his head very well. Mike looked a little bit like his father, if Lewis were ten years younger and still breathing. That wouldn’t end well.

I offered to book rooms at a hotel, but my mom refused to let us stay anywhere but at the house. Len and I ended up in my old bedroom while Lisa, Louise, and Saf took the guest room across the hall. Saf vanished in a puff of curiosity to see if she could return at the exact moment we had left, testing her accuracy, but more on that later.

I found my dad in the great room—a huge space with no walls that was simultaneously a kitchen, a dining room, and a sitting room—standing on the extension ladder and repainting the ceiling. I’d brought him a box of dark chocolate truffles from Planète Chocolat, the factory in Brussels we visited together when I was eleven. That was enough to make him forgive me, because my father was uncomplicated like that.

“So,” he climbed down the ladder and left the paint roller in a tray on one of the rungs, “this is your hoodlum.”

Here’s the thing: my dad was never the overprotective type, the only gun he owned was a rusty old thing my grandfather carried in the Korean war—which was a whole other thing, because Grandpa Cuthbert died of a heart attack when my dad was eleven and he was the one who found him on their kitchen floor, but I digress—and he never attempted to intimidate any of my ex-boyfriends because he trusted my judgment and wanted me to be happy. Whether or not I had terribad judgment—which I did, because my ex-boyfriends were very much bad teenage dating clichés—wasn’t the point. It was that my dad never considered me a piece of property for him to give away to another man at the end of a church aisle. Instead he always made sure I knew he thought of me as a smart girl capable of making her own mistakes and learning from them. That’s how I knew he didn’t mean anything by the hoodlum designation.

“Yeah.” Len folded his arms instead of touching me because he didn’t know how my dad would take him putting his hands on his daughter. Lewis was the sort of dad who cleaned his guns whenever Lisa had gentlemen callers. That’s what he was working with, sadly. “I’m hers as long as she’ll have me.”

“How about forever?” I booped his forearm, “does forever work for you?”30

“Yes,” Len smiled without taking his eyes off my dad, “it does.”

I took him back to my old bedroom after that. It was stripped bare, the bones of the furniture empty, the mattress covered in clean sheets but no bedding. “So,” Len watched me close the door and grinned when I turned to face him. “This is your bedroom.”

I propped my cane against the wall beside the bookshelves, which ran wall to wall and floor to ceiling. “Yeah,” I flailed one hand at the empty desk, “ever since I got my period at nine and refused to share a room with Kel anymore.”

Len sat on the bed and grinned wider. “This is the bed you slept in,” he murmured, “where you fantasized about me when you thought I wasn’t real, hmm?”

I blushed and challenged the floor to a staring contest. “Yes,” I fizzled out on the sibilant. “That is a thing I did.”

“Tell me what you fantasized about,” Len said in his smoothest voice.

“I’m not having sex with you in here while everyone is awake,” I retorted. “That mattress is squeaky as fuck. I don’t want anyone to hear us.”

Len tested the mattress and it squeaked under his palms. “Well,” he heaved a melodramatic sigh. “I suppose I can keep my hands off you,” he looked over his shoulder at me as I sat beside him, “for now.”

I kissed the corner of his mouth. “Thank you,” I said. “I do retroactively have permission to have sex in here, because I asked my parents if I could have sex in their house after I started dating Adam, but we never did anything even though he slept over twice—”

“What?” Len growled and his jaw clenched around the word, his jealousy showing.

I scoffed at him because there was nothing to be jealous of anymore. If there ever was at all. “Adam wouldn’t even hold my hand unless I told him to. I felt invisible when I was with him.” I curled onto my side and looked at him. “You see me. You listen when I speak. You care about how I feel and what I think. You unlearned a lifetime of lessons about love to make our relationship work. You taught yourself that being affectionate wasn’t a weakness for me. You would kill for me. You want to live your life with me.” I took his hand in both of mine and mapped his lifeline with my thumb. “I know we haven’t talked about my heroics, but I’m pretty sure you love the part of me that cares enough to save people too, even though you don’t like it.”

“That’s true,” Len told me softly. “I do love the part of you that cares because you care about me and my family. It’s because of you that I have another sister. It’s because of you that I have a home. I don’t want to lose you,” he cupped my face in the hand I wasn’t holding. “Not again.”

I intertwined my left hand with his right and curled the fingers of my right hand into the front of his shirt before I kissed him thoroughly. Len flicked his tongue underneath mine to lick the frenulum there. I broke the kiss and he pressed our foreheads together. I felt the furrow of his brow through my bangs, felt his thumbs stroking my cheekbone and forefinger.

Len kissed my forehead and lifted our intertwined hands to kiss my fingers. “This isn’t the bed you were raped on, is it?” he wondered.

“Not really,” I hedged. “These are new sheets, and a new mattress, and new box springs, and a new bedframe.”

“This world is where your rapist is,” Len said flatly. “Tell me his name. Let me kill him for what he did to you.”

I shook my head slowly. “Len, you made a deal with Barry to make sure no one else dies. I want you to honor that. I was gone when you shot your dad, but I’m here now. I have you. I have a future with you. That’s what I care about. Okay?”

Len made a frustrated noise low in his throat. “Mac…”

“Len,” I squirmed closer to whisper in his ear, “I’m not thinking about him. I’m thinking about straddling you and sucking you off tonight after everyone is asleep. I won’t make too much noise when I come if your big, thick cock is in my mouth—”

That’s when my mom knocked on the door and opened it before I gave her permission to come in like she always did. Luckily we weren’t doing anything but talking and kissing a little bit. Unluckily she was still adapting to her daughter being independent and boundaries were never her jam anyway.

“Mom,” I made a garbage disposal noise and flopped over to look at her with my hand still in his, “you didn’t wait for me to say it was okay to come in after you knocked.”

“I still can’t believe you got married without me,” my mom told me, “but at least now I can officiate your wedding here.”

I groaned internally. “Len doesn’t technically exist in this universe,” I told her while Len played with my fingers, “except as a fictional character. I can’t marry him legally.”

“Well,” my mom shrugged, “you said he was a criminal. Why can’t he marry you illegally?”

Len kept playing with my fingers. “That’s a compelling argument,” he pointed out. “Why not get married in two worlds, hmm?”

“Exactly,” my mom flailed one hand at him like an auctioneer showcasing a luxury item. “What he said.”

“Ugh,” I groaned externally, “you’re going to make me have a wedding during the family reunion, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” my mom nodded imperiously, her sharp chin descending, her stubborn jaw set. “Yes I am.”

I buried my face in the hand Len wasn’t holding and groaned eternally.

“Saf poofed,” Louise told me after my mom returned to her garden.

It took her a few days to get back. Then she narrowed her margin of error down to a few hours. Then a few minutes, until her accuracy was pinpoint. I had forgotten to cancel my standing appointment with the Earth-33 version of Saf. I figured introducing Senna to her counterpart wouldn’t cause a paradox because the Earth-1 version of Linda met Doctor Light without triggering a temporal anomaly, but that was another story.

Lisa shrugged and leaned against the doorframe that led into the guestroom. “That means we don’t have to share a bed,” she pointed out.

Louise cocked her head and her fishtail braid flopped over her shoulder. It was body language eerily reminiscent of their brother. “That’s true,” she turned back to face me, “but we didn’t pack for overnight. I know Lenny and Lisa brought their guns, and you’ve got your ubiquitous gigantic purse, but I’ve got nothing except the clothes on my back, my wallet, a phone that doesn’t work, and that Seanan McGuire book you gave me for Christmas.”

“ _Discount Armageddon_ is a great book,” I told her, “but you’re not wrong. I brought everything I owned in this reality to Earth-1 with me because I thought I was never coming back. I have the contents of my gigantic purse. That’s all.”31

Lisa grinned once she deduced where I was going and held out my keys. Saf must’ve given them to her before she left. “Get in, losers,” she grinned wider and shook the keys for emphasis, “we’re going shopping.”32

* * *

“How long are we staying?” Louise wondered from the backseat.

I shrugged. “Well,” I said, “my birthday is at the end of the month. I should celebrate it here. I can have Saf take you back to Earth-1 if you start missing your girlfriend, though.”

Louise rolled her eyes at me in the rearview mirror, but there was a hint of dark red tinting her brown skin. It occurred to me that I wasn’t sure how much older I was than I should’ve been. I had lived on Earth-33 for twenty-four years and eleven months. I’d lived on Earth-1 for approximately a year and a half after that. I spent three weeks on Earth-33—which I rounded up to a month because the year and a half I spent on Earth-1 was actually a year, six months, and six days—and returned to Earth-1 for two months. I had lived a year and nine months in the space between two worlds.

“I never got to celebrate my twenty-fifth birthday with my family here,” I said, “and I missed my twenty-seventh with you guys.”

“We celebrated your twenty-seventh without you.” Lisa flicked her gaze to Len in the rearview mirror and grinned. “We got blackout drunk and Lenny woke up in a dumpster the next morning.”

I giggled. I couldn’t help it! I guess both people in our marriage were trashcan inhabitants, figural and literal. “Where were you?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Len narrowed his eyes at his sister, “you never told me what happened to you that night, Sis.”

Lisa sighed. “I was with Cisco,” she told us softly. “I went to his place and slept over.”

Len didn’t know how to respond to that. I figured he’d seen it coming, but he had complicated feelings about Lisa and dudes. I did what any shipper would do, and squee’d. “Wait,” I held up both hands, “you had sex with Cisco?”

Lisa shook her head. “We kissed, but I was really drunk, and he didn’t take advantage. We watched  _The Walking Dead_ , and he made me breakfast in the morning after he gave me a hangover cure his uncle apparently swears by. Then he went to get ready for work and I snuck out,” she looked at Len in the rearview mirror. “I didn’t see him again until after our dad showed up and put a bomb in my neck. I thought maybe something could happen between us after he saved my life, but he doesn’t trust me. I do have…” Lisa shook off the bad vibes that had lingered after her father broke her heart for the last time, “…feelings for Cisco, but I refuse to settle for anything less than what Lenny has with you. I deserve that.”

“Yeah,” Len reached out to touch her shoulder, “you deserve everything that you want.”

I cried at the drop of a hat and I had the Snart siblings in my eye. It was a lethal combination. I sniffled while Lisa smiled and said, “Thanks, Lenny.”

“Mac,” Louise side-eyed me, “are you crying?”

“No,” I sniffled again. “Shut up.” Len chuckled and stroked my topmost vertebra with his cold fingertips. I yelped and gnarled my fingers like claws as I shuddered. “Your hands are  _cold_ ,” I whined.

“You know what they say,” Len murmured, “cold hands, warm heart.”

I rolled my eyes at him in the rearview mirror. “I’m perpetually warm,” I retorted. “What does that say about my heart?”

Len took his other hand off Lisa and leaned in to whisper in my ear, “Your heart’s mine, hmm?”

I exhaled a huff of laughter. I wasn’t a thing or a prize to be won, but that was a winning speech if I’d ever heard one. “Yes,” I told him once I stopped giggling. “Yes it is.”

Lisa parked in a handicapped space in front of Barnes & Noble and made a gagging noise as she pulled the emergency brake. I had to force myself to walk through B&N without browsing the books. I figured I’d save the best for last.

“Oh!” I bounced and shifted my weight off my ankle onto my cane. “If anyone mistakes you for the actors who play you on the show in this world, make something up about celebrity doppelgangers and say it happens all the time, but don’t introduce yourselves because people who read the comics or watch  _The Flash_ or  _Legends of Tomorrow_ will recognize your names. I’m also lucky the government didn’t abduct my parents or something after I opened an interdimensional portal in the backyard. I don’t want to push my luck, so we probably shouldn’t use our abilities unless it’s the only option.” I was using my powers to alter the security footage so we didn’t get caught on camera, but that was to keep anyone from getting live video of people who weren’t supposed to exist beyond a show on the small screen or in the pages of a comic book.

“Yeah,” Len took my hand and intertwined our fingers, “we don’t need the heat.”

“Well,” Lisa glanced at the plastic map that stood in the center of the walkway and folded her arms. “I’m going to Buckle. Let’s meet back here at…” she looked down at her pretty gold watch and saw it was one in the afternoon, “three-thirty. Cool?”

“Cool,” Len tucked his other hand in the pocket of his leather jacket. “Have fun, Sis.”

Lisa smiled at him over her shoulder and her golden curls oscillated down her back as she walked away.

Louise was looking at the nearby Baskin Robbins with a predatory glint in her eerie ice blue eyes. No double scoop of mint chocolate chip stood a chance against Killer Frost. “Cool.”

“Cool,” I said. I was having cognitive dissonance again. It felt unreal to have Len here. “I used to shoplift here,” I told him softly, “when I was a teenager. I was such a moody bastard, and when Waldenbooks went out of business my ex-boyfriend Adam joked that it was my fault because I used to walk in with a duffle and walk out with it full of books.”

Len grinned, delighted. I thought suddenly, abruptly, of him biting me. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?” he asked.

“What, the sordid details of petty crimes I did twelve years ago?” I shrugged. “I’m not like you. I didn’t steal because I loved it,” I started to shuffle off with his hand in mine and he fell into step beside me while I spoke, “my thought process was very simple. I got twelve-fifty a week in allowance for chores I did around the house. I figured if I stole things, I’d have things and money for other things I couldn’t steal. That’s all.”

Len brought my hand to his lips and kissed my knuckles. “I am very attracted to you right now,” he told me lowly, “but you’re too squeamish to let me fuck you in a changing room, hmm?”

“It’s not squeamishness,” I retorted. “It’s that full-length mirrors do nothing for my self-esteem, especially full-length triple mirrors—” I tilted my head to look up at his face and my eyebrows arched at his filthy smirk, “you’re thinking about fucking me in front of a full-length mirror, aren’t you?”

Len cocked his head and smirked wider. That was a yes. I buried a snort in the sleeve of his jacket over his upper arm before I stopped in front of a store. I had forgotten the Silverdale mall was opening a Torrid storefront that summer. I may or may not have squee’d.

“Okay,” I said, “you go shop for dude things. I’m going in there.”

“Nah,” Len quit holding my hand and tucked his hands in his pockets. “I think I’d prefer to help you pick out the panties I’m going to take off you later,” he grinned and held my gaze before he added, “with my  _teeth_.”

I blushed and my thighs clenched under my skirt. Len kept grinning while I shuffled into the store. I figured he didn’t want to leave me alone because we were in a whole other world. I’d been on Earth-1 for almost two months when I met Len for real, but he’d never been to Earth-33 and he was literally out of his world. I wondered if I should’ve let Lisa and Louise go off alone. I figured the self-explanatory nature of the mall was a constant in the multiverse, but maybe I was wrong. Oh well.

Len talked the salesgirl into letting him go with me into the changing room after she wrote  _Mac_ in green dry erase marker in the whiteboard slot on the door. I hung the clothes I wanted to try on, propped my cane against the wall, and dropped my purse in one corner of the seat jutting out from the wall. “I’m not having sex with you in here,” I said.

Len sat in the corner that wasn’t occupied by my purse and focused on me. “I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do,” he told me.

“That’s what I’m worried about,” I muttered under my breath.

Len chuckled, but he stopped cold after I yanked my dress over my head. I folded it on the seat in front of my purse and removed a dress from a hanger. Len dragged his gaze up and down my body and made a low noise of approval, the weight of his eyes on me heavy and heated. I may or may not have gulped.

I supposed we were technically still in the honeymoon phase. Len and I had been sexually active for less than four nonconsecutive months in almost two years together, so he’d spent most of our relationship wanting me without having me, and it showed now that he could have me whenever he wanted.

I saved the lingerie for last. I’d picked out some of my own because I knew he would go for sexy, not practical, and there was a difference between comfortable underwear and underthings you wore for a man before he stripped them off. Torrid had both kinds, though.

“Thongs,” I looked over my shoulder at him. “Really?”

Len folded his arms while his gaze lingered on my ass. “Indulge me,” he said in his smoothest voice.

“Okay.” I worked my panties down and tried a thong on. I still wasn’t a fan of full-length mirrors or the fluorescent lights that always lit up dressing rooms. It was like my flaws were on display in a freak show or something. I had stretch marks and dark pubic hair and I was a fat girl in a thong. It wasn’t pretty. I felt hollow and unsexy. I wanted to put on all of the clothes. Like, all of them.

That’s when Len made another low humming noise of approval. “Turn around,” he told me. I did what he said and shifted my weight off my ankle. Len stood and cupped my face in both hands before he hunched to kiss me. I stopped thinking and melted into him. “I see you,” he murmured after he broke the kiss. “I love you no matter what you’re wearing,” he glanced down the line of my body and smirked, “or not wearing.”

“I’m sorry,” I deadpanned, “the feeling isn’t mutual when you’re wearing your parka.”

“Mac,” Len cocked his head and he knew me well enough to know I was lying, “I’ve seen the costume from the comics now. Just be glad I’m not wearing that.”

I bought the thongs he picked out, and bras, and several pretty dresses I’d picked out. Then it was my turn to sit in a dressing room while he got naked and tried clothes on. I talked him into buying some lighter colors because it was summer, and the whole black on black thing was a terribad idea, even though a Washingtonian summer was nowhere near as hot as summer in Missouri. I still couldn’t quite process that we were in my world, especially since it didn’t feel the same. I didn’t belong there anymore.

There were flecks of green in his grey eye, he had a mole by his hairline near his left eyebrow, and an ugly half-moon of scar tissue from a broken beer bottle circled his right shoulder at a sloppy angle. There was also a set of scars fitted perfectly to my fingertips on his clavicle, pink and fresh compared to the older jagged slubs visible when he took his shirt off. I gnawed on the inside of my cheek as I watched the muscles work under his skin. I wanted to nibble on his earlobe or lick the base of his spine. All that stopped me was my inability to decide which I wanted to do first.

“I see you too,” I told him, “and I would love you in the parka from the comics even though it’s terribad.”

Len glanced over his shoulder and smiled without baring his teeth. I thought about kneeling to lick the base of his spine. I thought about his hands in my hair, his dick in my mouth, him saying my name sharply, desperately when he came. I wanted him so badly. Luckily the feeling was mutual.

“Thank you,” I told him softly, “for being here. I should warn you, though. It’s going to be the whole Lowell clan at this reunion, and I totally understand if you don’t want to stay for that—”

“Mac,” Len turned to face me and folded his arms. “I never had a big family. I want to meet yours. I want to be part of your world.”

I giggled. I couldn’t help it! I also may or may not have squeaked with laughter. “Was that a  _Little Mermaid_ reference?” I asked.

Len nodded. “Lisa was three when it came out,” he told me, “my grandfather and I took her to see it.”

I giggled again. “That’s so cute.”

“Lisa was a cute kid.” Len shrugged his jacket back on over his shirt and grinned. “I’m actually really excited to hear all of the embarrassing stories about your childhood.”

“Ugh!” I used my cane to get back on my feet. “Just for that, I’m going to warn you that someone in the family is a leg hair puller, but I’m not saying who.”

* * *

Lisa drove us to Wal-Mart for toiletries and Central Market for groceries on the way back to my parents’ house. I spent most of the day cooking after that. I left a pot of soup on the stove to simmer and undressed before I crawled into bed with Len. It was cramped, especially compared to our king-sized long bed at home. I felt pretty cozy, though. Len had put himself between me and the door, which was a thing he did at home too. It was something he’d started doing whenever Lisa would have a bad dream, just in case their father came looking for someone to hit in the middle of the night.

“I want to watch you touch yourself,” Len told me lowly. “I want to see how you made yourself come for me before you knew I was real.”

“I’ve masturbated in front of you before,” I pointed out. “It’s not like I paddled the pink canoe any differently in this world.”

Len chuckled at my euphemism. “Well,” he shrugged, which was awkward with him lying on his side, “I’d still like to see that.”

I flopped onto my back and exhaled a whoosh of air. “Okay,” I whispered.

Len peeled back the covers and made another low humming noise of approval when he saw that I was wearing a thong he’d picked out. I felt his eyes on me and that’s all it took to get my nipples hard. I closed my eyes and cupped my breasts. I was aware that my hands were smaller and softer than his. I couldn’t fit each breast in one palm, so I focused on my nipples, swirling my thumbs over my areolae and flicking the hard nubs with my fingertips while my hips lurched up without my permission. I tugged my bottom lip between my teeth to stifle a soft pleasure noise before I spread my legs. I slipped my hand under the crotch of the thong to cup myself, stroking one finger into my slit and whimpering at how wet I was. I slicked up two fingertips and rubbed my clit. I never put my own fingers inside me when I masturbated because the angle felt wrong somehow. Not being able to bend the wrist attached to my dominant hand didn’t help, either. I covered my mouth with my other hand while I traced the folds of my cunt in shiny, sticky lines. I focused on my clit and unspooled, muffling a little yelp in the hollow of my palm.

I pulled my hand out from under the crotch of the thong and flexed my fingers to pop the joints. Len caught my wrist and greedily sucked the slick from my fingertips. I squirmed under him as his other hand slipped down between my legs. Len settled on his elbow and knees over me and used his thumb to push the soaking wet scrap of lace aside. Then he kissed me to stifle the shrill noise I made while he worked two fingers into me knuckle deep. I moaned into his mouth and my hips bucked so hard the mattress creaked. Len made a raw sound low in his throat for me and fucked me with his fingers until I came and clenched tight around them.

I straddled him after he fingered me and sucked his cock while he ate me out. I came again with him inside my mouth and took it when he thrust himself deeper into my throat to blow his load there, my jaw slack with my own pleasure as I swallowed his come. Len buried his face between my legs and made vulgar enthusiastic noises while he fucked me with his tongue. I squirmed as his voice shuddered through me like thunder. Len spread my ass further apart with his hands and licked my asshole in little teasing flicks until my whole perineum clenched.

“Rude,” I huffed quietly, “the no butt stuff rule still applies in parallel universes, dude.”

Len heaved a sigh before he got busy licking up the wetness that had dripped all over my thighs. I spread his thighs and teased his asshole with one fingertip while I sucked his balls into my mouth. Unlike me, he’d consented to butt stuff. “Mac,” he growled.

I hummed a nonverbal  _What?_ because my mouth was preoccupied with his balls, and swirled a little circle over his asshole.

“I want…” Len curled his fingers into the flesh of my thighs hard enough to bruise and growled again wordlessly before he articulated, “I want you to fuck me.”

I moved to kneel between his legs and spread his thighs apart before I took the tube of lubricant he’d bought for this explicit purpose out of the desk drawer. Len settled on his elbows and tilted his head while he watched me squeeze the slick, sticky stuff onto my fingers. I broke eye contact while I worked him open slowly with my forefingers and crooked them to find a place that provoked a sharp, desperate groan. Len covered his mouth with one hand and fisted the other in the sheets. I kissed my way over the taut muscles of his stomach before I licked his nipples and nipped his collarbone. Len grabbed my hair and buried his face in the space between my neck and shoulder, his raw exhales hot and heavy against my skin. I gauged his reactions and catalogued them. Every gasp and sigh and moan. Every little hitch in his throat. Every clench in his jaw and grit of his teeth. Every shudder under the skin of his belly and thighs and chest. Every clutch of his fingers in my hair. Len nuzzled my neck and said my name softly over and over, the sound a quiet litany punctuated by torqued ellipses until he choked on the monosyllable and hissed a soft  _yes_  into my ear.

I wrapped my other hand around his cock and swirled my thumb over the head of him to rub in his precome. That’s when he thrust himself into my hand and came all over my palm. Len didn’t go soft after he came. I licked his semen off my hand before I plucked a tissue from the paper box on my desk and wiped my other hand clean. I was still too squeamish to lick my fingers after they’d been in his asshole. I was pleased with myself for getting him so incoherent, though. I’d made him whimper. I’d made him whine. I’d made him weak for me. Not that it was inherently weak to get fucked, because it wasn’t, but in that moment he was mine completely. I was inside him. I had overwhelmed him. I loved that.

I stroked his short hair while he relearned how to breathe. Len didn’t blush at the drop of a hat like I did, but he was flushed now. It just wasn’t as noticeable because his skin was dark compared to mine. “Good?” I asked him softly.

“Yeah,” Len said with slow vehemence. “Very.”

I nodded and made a futile attempt to untangle myself from him. Len used the hand in my hair to pull me flush against his body instead. “Where do you think you’re going, hmm?” he murmured. “I’m not finished with you.”

“I think you finished all over my hand,” I retorted, “and inside my mouth.”

“It’s true.” Len rubbed the hard length of him against my slit. I flushed so brightly he must’ve felt the heat under my skin and whimpered as the head of his cock brushed my clit. “I did, but I haven’t fucked you with my big, thick cock yet.” I blushed harder because he used my words from before and he smirked. “That’s what you really want, isn’t it?” he asked. I tugged my bottom lip between my teeth and nodded. Len smirked wider and kissed my forehead. “Now tell me,” he whispered lowly, “how do you want it, Mrs. Snart?”

That’s how I ended up lying sideways with my leg up while he fucked me from behind, one of his hands slipping down between my legs while the other cupped my breast. It was a position we hadn’t used since we visited the Earth-1 version of Poulsbo and we woke up spooning every morning. I’d forgotten how intense his thrusts were at that angle. I’d chosen that position so I could take it from behind while I was lying down instead of being on my knees. I was tired and my hand was sore after fingering him, okay? I could be turned on and sleepy all at once. I was large, I contained multitudes.33

Len rubbed my nipple between his thumb and forefingers. I covered my mouth with the hand I wasn’t using to hold my leg up and muffled a loud, needy moan. Len kissed my neck and pulled out until only the head of his cock was inside me. “Say my name,” he growled.

“Len,” I gasped. “Len, I need you, please—”

That’s when he tilted my head up and kissed me hard. Len cupped my face and licked into my mouth before he thrust all the way inside me with one hard stroke. I moaned and sucked on his tongue while the fingers of his other hand rubbed my clit roughly. Len held me while his hips met mine, the striking rhythm of him fucking me obscenely loud. It seemed quieter than my thundering heartbeat, though. I came on his cock and my orgasm was so intense I screamed a little bit, another shrill noise stifled by his mouth. Len broke the kiss to exhale a hoarse, ecstatic laugh and came inside me. I guess hearing me scream for him was what pushed him over the edge. I wriggled onto my back and looked at him while he slipped out.

Len cradled the back of my head and stole a sweet, lingering kiss. “I made you  _scream_ ,” he murmured smugly. “There’s no way your parents didn’t hear you.”

I rolled my eyes. “I listened to them banging over my head for years before they remodeled the house,” I told him with a yawn, “it’s the circle of life, and it moves us all.”34

Len burst out laughing after he got my reference. I covered his mouth with one hand while his hand fisted in my hair. I giggled and covered my own mouth with my other hand. Len pressed his forehead against mine and we shook together.

“Go the fuck to sleep!” Louise shouted from the guestroom.35

I squeaked and laughed harder. I was still giggling when I got up and went to the bathroom to clean up the mess he’d made between my legs. I washed the sweat and semen off me and brushed my teeth before I checked on the soup.

I didn’t take my meds, but more on that later.

(Wait for it.)

* * *

I overheard him talking with my parents about what they’d missed a few days later, because I’d changed so much while I was in another dimension. Which hurt them. Which hurt me to hear, but it wasn’t a shock.

What shocked me was my mom telling Len about what I was like before my disability became a thing. How angry I used to be. How selfish and isolated I was as a teenager. How much sadness I started carrying around once my disability manifested. How they worried I wouldn’t let myself be happy because I didn’t believe I was ever going to meet someone who loved me, and belief was powerful enough to make me into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I wasn’t the daughter who shuffled across the stage at graduation a month ago in this world. I hadn’t just fallen in love and gotten married. I’d become a metahuman, and then a superhero. It was a lot to take in, especially for someone like my mother, who never understood why reality wasn’t enough for me. It didn’t surprise my parents that I’d gone to a whole other world, though. I’d been doing that for most of my life, after all.

“I’m not going to take your daughter away from you,” Len told my parents in the smooth voice he used to make winning speeches. “I want to give her everything. That includes a way back to you, to her family.” Len idly tapped his fingertips together so his hands arched over the tabletop. “I love her,” he said in the most vulnerable tone I’d ever heard come out of his mouth, “she deserves the best of both worlds.”

That’s when I sneezed, either from summer allergies or the superstition that you sneezed when people were talking about you. Len changed the subject to the paneling above the fireplace as I sat beside him. I took his hand under the table and held it while my dad talked about fiberboard versus wood paneling. Apparently there was a type of textured acrylic paneling called, hilariously, cracked ice.

I giggled. I couldn’t help it! That association was hilarious if you were married to a dude who wielded a cryogenic superweapon. Fight me.

That night, I told my parents I was leaving after the wedding. I was tempting fate by returning at all. I knew using the _dào_ had consequences, and eventually someone would notice that interdimensional travel was going on. It was only a matter of time, and staying for my birthday, the reunion, and my second wedding was my way of saying goodbye to this world. I’d made my choice when I left the first time, but I needed to return to realize it. I’d chosen Earth-1. I’d chosen the person I had become. I was going to stand up with Len in front of everyone I loved on Earth-33 because I’d chosen him, too, and then I was leaving for good.

Later, when I remade my vows, I revised what I’d said at our first wedding.

I told Len: _Where you go, I go_.

(Wait for it.)

* * *

I took Louise to Pike Place Market the next day because she’d never been there and bought Lisa another flower crown in hot pink, as opposed to the blue one I’d gotten her a year before. Len stole a pair of earrings for me from one of the booths in the market, which sparked a terribad argument between us, pun unintended.

“Len,” I huffed, “please go put those back.”

Len turned to face me and folded his arms. “Why should I?” he asked.

I sighed. “There’s a difference between stealing artwork, which is insured, or robbing banks, which are insured, or stealing jewels, which are insured, and stealing from people who make their own products with money out of their own pockets for minimal profit, which you know.”

Len snorted. “I’m a thief, Mac. It’s what I do,” he said in the smooth voice he used to make winning speeches. “Besides, you knew who I was before we started this. Don’t act so high and mighty now.”

“Okay,” I stretched the  _y_ sound out awkwardly, “but we have infinite money because I’m a technopath, so stealing from the latter kind of target is just petty and cruel—”

“That’s not my problem.” Len tilted his head and I figured he was looking down on me in the literal and figural sense of the phrase. “I told you. I’m a thief. Don’t expect me to not be what I am.”

Trouble was, Len wasn’t satisfied with being just a criminal anymore, but he didn’t know how to feel about that beyond resenting me for it. Hence this argument.

“I never asked you to be anything other than who you are,” I pointed out.

“I didn’t want a serious relationship,” Len snarked back.

“I never asked you to get serious!” I snapped and hissed the sibilants. “I told you I couldn’t do casual and I expected it to be a dealbreaker. You were the one who decided to have a serious relationship with me instead. I wasn’t even thinking about marriage. You’re the one who proposed. I would’ve been comfortable with a long engagement. You’re the one who got our marriage certificate and suggested we go to the courthouse a few days after you gave me the ring. I didn’t make you do any of that. I never made you do anything,” I sighed and shifted my weight off my bad ankle, “all I have ever done is love you.”

That’s when he turned and walked away. I didn’t follow him because I knew he was better at being emotional alone. Lisa must’ve known this better than me, but that didn’t stop her from stomping after him in her stilettoes. Louise squeezed my shoulder with her cold fingers. “Want to get piroshky now?” she asked quietly.

“Yes.” I squared my shoulders in a futile attempt to unclench. “Yes, I do.”

Lisa returned with Len while Louise and I were in line for Piroshky Piroshky. Apparently he found alcohol before his sister found him. Len wasn’t drunk, but I smelled the beer on his breath when he sat beside me and leaned the sideways line of his body against mine, shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh. I felt his eyes all over me and felt the tension crawling through him while my own anxiety brewed like a storm in a teacup.

I didn’t speak to him until we got back to my parents’ house. I kept stuffing potato and cheese piroshky into my mouth to avoid snapping at him. I still had a few left after we got back, though. I dropped the half-full paper bag on the desk and flopped into bed with a whoosh of air.

“Why didn’t you break me out of jail?” Len asked in his calmest voice. “You should’ve come for me instead of Mardon. Why didn’t you?”

I sighed. “You know why,” I hedged. “I want to do more. I want to be more. I couldn’t be Lady Zeus if people knew I was also Mrs. Cold.”

“You could’ve broken me out without anyone knowing,” Len snarked back. “You proved that after what happened with Bea. You let the detective take me back to Iron Heights after we saved her. Why did you do that?”

I exhaled with enough force to flap my lips. “This is sort of a spoiler,” I said, “but your incarceration was a big part of your character development. I loved your character development. I didn’t want to change your story.”

“That logic is for crap,” Len growled. “This is not a story. It’s my life. It’s our life together, Mac. I never would’ve left you in jail. I would’ve come for you and killed anyone who stood against me.”

I could feel tears coming and a lump raveled in my throat like a ball of wooly yarn. “That’s not what I want!” I yelled.

I had never yelled at him before. Len flinched like I’d physically hurt him. That’s when I burst into tears. I hated that I cried at the drop of a hat. I buried my face in both hands and tugged my bottom lip between my teeth to muffle the angry sobs. I was full of impotent rage at myself and at him. I’d liked what my life had been like when he was in jail. I’d liked having time for myself, for volunteering and heroics, for my new friends. I didn’t know how to have all of that and be married to him. I’d never had to compartmentalize so much before. I figured it was time to learn.

Len crawled into bed with me and held me while I cried. “What do you want?” he asked. “Tell me.”

I sniffled and belatedly took my glasses off. “I want to keep doing what I’ve been doing as Lady Zeus. I want to stay friends with people you hate,” I exhaled yet another whoosh of air, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t still want you. I’m sorry I’ve been acting like our life together is a fictitious narrative instead of the realest thing that’s ever happened to me. I’m sorry I didn’t come to save you.”

“I don’t want to be saved,” Len told me.

“Okay…” I swallowed thickly. “What do you want?”

Len tilted my face up. “This,” he said. Then he kissed me softly, slowly, surely. I figured that meant he was done talking about his feelings. I didn’t know how I felt about that. In hindsight, I probably should’ve pushed him into talking a little bit more.

(Wait for it.)

I kissed him back until he broke the kiss and nipped my jaw. “Oh,” I whispered, “do you still want to marry me, y’know, again?”

“Yes,” Len murmured, “you never wear white. I’d like to see that.”

“I wore white lingerie to our wedding on Earth-1,” I retorted.

“Yeah,” Len smirked at the memory, “but white panties are different than white dresses. I’m not planning on being able to see through your wedding gown,” he smirked wider, “but I wouldn’t be opposed if you wore something see-through underneath.”

“Noted.” I leaned in and nuzzled his nose with mine. “I love you,” I told him, “no matter what.”

Len kissed me again hard enough to make me moan a little bit. “I love you too,” he said fervently, “and I shouldn’t have expected you to do what I would’ve done. I like how different we are. I don’t want to be with someone like me,” he smoothed his palm along my spine and curled his fingers into my hair. “I need someone like you.”

I looked him in the eyes and scooped my fingers under his shirt. “So…” I mapped the facets of sinew and muscle under his skin and stretched the long  _oh_ sound out into an innuendo, “makeup sex?”

“Yeah.” Len smiled back as he smoothed his other hand up my thigh and under my skirt. “Sure.”

“Tell me what you want.” I pressed my palm flat over where his heartbeat was. “I want to please you.”

Len worked my dress up over my head and dropped it over the edge of the mattress. Then he unhooked my bra to cup my breasts. “I want to fuck these,” he told me. “I don’t suppose you’re feeling sorry enough to let me come on your pretty face.”

“Nope,” I shook my head slowly, “and telling me I’m pretty doesn’t make the possibility of getting semen in my eye less gross.”

Len chuckled and that sound was enough to make me whimper softly. “Noted,” he flicked my nipples with his thumbs and I was squirming under him when he asked, “how about I come on your breasts?”

I blushed. I couldn’t help it! I was embarrassed by what he wanted from me. Not enough to tell him no, though. I was actually a little bit curious. I wanted to know how it would feel to have him between my breasts. I wanted to know whether or not it would be any good for me. “Okay,” I whispered.

I laid on my back and watched him undress. Len straddled my waist and pushed my breasts together with his cock between them. I didn’t know exactly what to do with my hands. I reached out to grab his hips and my upper arms pushed my breasts closer together around the hard length of him before he started to move. “Tell me what you fantasized about,” he murmured.

“I had this one specific fantasy. I’d be working in the library, incongruously alone, when you’d show up. I guess you were running from the cops or something. Anyhow, you’d threaten to shoot me because you’re a melodramatic loser. I’d offer to do whatever you wanted and you’d order me to strip for you.” I held his gaze and squirmed at the friction of him fucking my breasts as his thrusts got rougher. I felt heated all over and the raw incalescence in his eyes wasn’t helping. Neither was the way his thumbs were flicking over my nipples, for that matter. “It wasn’t exactly the same every time, but most of the time I’d end up sitting on your lap. I fantasized about you playing with my breasts. I touched myself while I thought about you touching me through my panties until I was soaked and begging for your fingers in my slutty wet hole.”

Len moaned at that and closed his eyes. I’ll admit I was pleased with myself. I’d never done the dirty talk before, not without him telling me precisely what to say. Instead he asked me to use my own words and it was working. I flicked my tongue over the head of him on his next thrust and tasted his precome. Len hissed and his jaw clenched around my name. “Mac,” he growled, “keep talking.”

“Sometimes there was a desk,” I told him, “you’d order me to get up on all fours and you’d eat me out. Then you’d bend me over the desk and fuck me from behind,” I moaned because his sticky precome made his thrusts feel smooth and slick between my breasts, “you’d pull out before you came, and you’d go all over my ass—”

That’s when he came for me, his whole body shuddering with the intensity of his orgasm, his come spilling hot over my skin. I watched his clenched jaw go slack and blushed harder when he said my name again. Len hunched over me and left a trickle of semen down my torso when he moved back to kneel between my thighs. Then he buried his face where his cock had been to clean up his mess, licking and sucking his semen off me while his throat and mouth worked noisily. I stroked his short hair and moaned again when he dragged his tongue over my nipple.

Len slipped one hand between my thighs and rubbed me through my panties while he nuzzled my belly. “I really do think you’re pretty,” he told me softly. “I don’t just say that because I want to fuck you. I love the way you look. I love your body,” he tugged my panties down and greedily stroked the coarse damp curls between my legs before he used his fingers to spread me open, “and that includes your slutty wet hole.”

That’s when he licked me. I clung to the back of his head while his lips brushed my wet folds. Len flicked the flat of his tongue over my clit and I covered my mouth with my other hand to stifle a loud whimper. I felt him make a satisfied noise low in his throat after he worked his tongue into me and my hips ground against his face. Len took it before he tugged my clit between his teeth and sucked it gently. I unspooled and muffled a scream in the hollow of my palm while bright phosphenes flashed behind my eyelids. Len fucked me with his tongue while I twitched and squirmed through glossy aftershocks. I was trembling when he crawled up my body to kiss me hard, licking into my mouth so I tasted the evidence of my arousal in the slant of his lips on mine.

Len broke the kiss and pressed our foreheads together. “I love you,” he said with slow vehemence, “no matter what the future holds.”

“I love you too,” I told him breathlessly, “and I’m a fan of your winning speeches.”

Len burst out laughing. “Always pleased to meet a fan,” he said in that low voice before he kissed me again.

Lisa chose that inopportune moment to bang on the door with an open palm instead of knocking with her knuckles. “Mac,” she said my name snappishly and I knew something had made her nervous, “quit fucking my brother. I think your whole family just got here.”

Len took his hands off me with a disgruntled noise. I wriggled out from under his body and went to take a shower alone because I didn’t want to smell like sex at the first Lowell clan reunion since 1992. Len took a cold shower when I was done because he’d gotten hard again from eating me out.

I found Lisa after I changed my clothes and shuffled into the hallway. “Hey,” I booped her shoulder, “is the idea of meeting my family weirder than you thought it’d be?”

Lisa pressed her lips into a thin line and furrowed the space between her eyebrows. “I have no idea how to talk to those people,” she muttered. “What do you even say to them?”

“I don’t say much,” I told her softly. “There’s a reason I used to hide out in my room whenever they visited before. I’ve never fit in with my family, but they’ve always loved me. Len calls you a trainwreck, but he doesn’t actually think you’re a trainwreck—”

Lisa side-eyed me. “Mac, you’re a terrible liar.”

I rolled my eyes at her even though she wasn’t wrong. “Lisa, talk about medaling silver in the US Figure Skating Championships when you were fourteen. Or about that one time you were pulling a job in Milan and part of your cover was being a runway model during fashion week. Or about your shiny new black and gold motorcycle. Or about starting high school as a junior when you’d been doing mandatory study time since you started training at the tender age of nine. Or about how you had a torrid affair with Roscoe Dillon when you were sixteen and he was your ice dancing coach and that’s not only the reason you left the sport but also the reason you never went to the Olympics. It’s not like you’re boring. Hell, you couldn’t be boring if you tried for a hundred years.”36

Roscoe Dillon was a former Olympian in this reality who won the gold in ice dancing at the 1998 Winter Olympics with his partner Sigrid Nansen.37 Lisa was an Olympic hopeful in 2002 with Roscoe as her coach before they got caught  _in flagrante_  by Lewis, who beat Roscoe half to death and went to prison for aggravated assault. It was such a high profile case—because the victim was an Olympic gold medalist—that Lewis got a full sentence of twenty years at Iron Heights. That’s what he was still in prison for.

Here’s the thing: Len used money he got from pulling jobs to fund her figure skating dreams, but then Lewis went to jail and Lisa ended up living with Lester while Len pulled jobs all over the planet and became the world class thief I knew and loved. Lisa became a criminal because she missed her jerk brother, and she was amazing at being a thief. Snarted from the bottom now we’re here, pun intended. Not that I would ever say that out loud.

Anyhow.

“I really don’t want to be thinking about my dad right now,” Lisa groaned and her jaw clenched around the mention of her father.

“Yeah,” I sighed, “that’s my bad. Sorry.”

Lisa accepted my apology with a quick nod. “What are your brothers like?” she asked me.

“Mike is a podiatrist,” I told her, “which is a fancy word for foot doctor, he thinks a two hundred dollar box of cigars is cheap, and he golfs. Phil is a park ranger, he loves the outdoors for some unfathomable reason, and he lost his hair during chemo before I was born, so he’s the bald eagle of the clan.”

That’s when Len took my hand and intertwined our fingers. “Actually,” he looked at his sister over my head, “two hundred dollars is cheap for a box of high end cigars.”

Lisa nodded in agreement. “I like cigars,” she told me, “did your brother happen to bring a stash I can steal from?”

“Let’s find out,” Len suggested with a tiny smirk.

“Nope!” I stood on tiptoe and booped his nose in warning. “No stealing from my family.”

“Sure,” Lisa folded her arms and nudged me back, “as long as Lenny and I get to keep you.”

“Yeah.” I tucked my other hand in the crook of her elbow. “I think you’re pretty much stuck with me for life,” I turned and looked over my shoulder at Louise in the guestroom, “sorry not sorry.”

Introducing them to my family went pretty well, all told. Mike did attempt to give Len a cooshwah—which was basically a swipe upside the head—but when Len caught his wrist in midair and glared at him, he laughed it off instead of making a big stink over it. I smacked Mike upside the head after that. No matter how funny he thought it was, hitting my husband wasn’t okay.

Lisa was talking to my cousin Lizzy, who had been an Olympic hopeful when she was a teenager, but as a gymnast, not an ice dancer. Louise had challenged my nephew Spenser—Ellie’s brother, twenty-two years old, same age as Kel—to a game of chess with my old wooden chessboard topped with mismatched pieces. I’d used pepper and saltshakers in place of the missing pawns before I got a tiny plastic chess set at the dollar store, but I digress. I kibitzed and watched Louise set up the accelerated Dragon variation on the Sicilian defense in four moves. I never won against my dad at chess because I wasn’t patient enough, but I could beat pretty much anyone else because I didn’t care about impressing opponents who weren’t my dad, so I didn’t get sloppy.

“That’s sharp as fuck.” I watched as Spenser countered with the Classical variation. “I’d castle kingside, dude.”

“She’s not using the Yugoslav,” my nephew retorted. “She can’t get at…”

That’s when Louise put Spenser in check by taking his queen. Then it was checkmate in six moves. Louise grinned up at me. “Want to play winner?” she asked.

I shrugged and folded myself into the chair Spenser had occupied. I beat her with a Fool’s mate, checkmate in two moves. I’d never done it before and I’d probably never do that again. It was awesome.

Len folded his arms on the back of the chair and leaned in so close I could feel his breath hot on my ear. “I am very attracted to you right now,” he murmured.

I rolled my eyes at him even though he couldn’t see my face. “I didn’t pull off a Fool’s mate to make you want me,” I deadpanned.

“No,” Len smirked and I could hear the smug unfurling of his mouth in his voice, “but smart is sexy, and you’re  _very_ smart, Mac.”

“I know.” I reached back to touch his face and turned to kiss the corner of his mouth. Len covered my fingers with his palm and kissed my lips at a slanted angle.

“Mackenzie,” said a voice from behind the couch Louise had been sitting on while we played chess. That was a voice I knew really well. It belonged to my favorite person in the multiverse.

I broke the kiss and looked over the back of the couch to see my big sister. “Oh,” I exhaled softly. “Hey, Sis.”

Stephanie Jensen-Lowell, my sister, was a first grade teacher who could’ve been my biological mother if she’d gotten pregnant at twenty-two. Actually, people mistook us for mother and daughter when I was younger and she was living with us. Len practically raised Lisa while my sister had practically raised me and my brother. I loved her best. I always had.

“Hi,” Steph waved to my husband and smiled, “so you’re the guy who made my stubborn as hell little sister change her mind about love and marriage.”

I might’ve squawked indignantly. “I was never against love or marriage,” I huffed. “I just didn’t think I was ever going to fall in love or get married, and I had to get sucked into another dimension before it happened, so.”

Len chuckled. “Didn’t hear you deny how stubborn you really are,” he told me lowly.

“Well,” I deadpanned, “you know I’m the worst liar.”

“That’s true.” Len curled his fingers over my shoulder and stroked my clavicle with his thumb. “It’s cute.”

I covered his fingers with my palm and idly stroked my fingertips over the back of his hand. “Shut your face,” I said without heat before I fizzled out on the consonant at the end and giggled. Len used his other hand to tilt my chin up and kissed my forehead softly.

How affectionate he was might’ve seemed incongruous, but he spent so many years avoiding all physical contact that wasn’t violent or sexual. Len kept putting his hands or his mouth on minor erogenous zones he knew how to target at the beginning of our relationship, but we didn’t have sex until almost a year had gone by. That’s when he learned he liked touching me in nonsexual ways, and now he put his hands on me whenever or wherever he could. I was surprised he never conflated sex with violence, actually. I wanted to try spanking once, to see what it was like. Len said no because the idea of hitting me—open palmed or closed fist—didn’t turn him on. That was enough to make me get a little gooey.

I knew he was capable of violence. I also never doubted that he’d keep me safe by any means necessary. I knew no one would ever touch me without my permission again with him around. That was part of the appeal of loving fictional villains for me: the idea of having someone ruthless to protect me when I wasn’t physically capable of doing it myself. This became obsolete when I manifested fulgurkinetic abilities, though. I could’ve electrocuted anyone who tried to touch me without my consent now that I was a metahuman. How cool was that?

Anyhow.

Sis stuffed her hands in the pockets of her skirt and exhaled a quiet puff of laughter. “So,” she grinned and stretched the word out into an innuendo, “my baby sister finally lost her virginity. It’s about time.”

I made a garbled noise in my throat. “Yeah,” I retorted, “but virginity is a social construct that simultaneously commodifies and polices female sexuality. If more dudes understood the importance of foreplay and female pleasure, the myth of popping cherries wouldn’t persist, but it does, because women thinking pain and no pleasure is a normal part of sex means that dudes will never have to up their game in the bedroom. I lost nothing by waiting for a dude who knows what he’s doing.”

“Fair enough.” Sis held up her hands in mock surrender. Then she went to help mom with dinner in the kitchen, where all four of the aunts had taken over. I wondered how many cobblers were going to lurk in the depths of the fridge after the afternoon faded into evening. At least one each of blackberry and peach, because there were fresh blackberries on the counter and ripe white peaches had come in from the tree outside.

I slumped in the chair and sighed happily. “I missed her,” I told Len, “even though she hates it when I go all feminist discourse on her.”

“Well,” Len moved to sit on the couch across from me. “I liked what you said. I don’t think you lost anything during our first time,” he gave me a tiny smile that unfurled into something filthy, “I’d say we both won.”

That’s when my younger nephews—one fourteen, the other twelve—swarmed the chair I was sitting in. “Aunt Kenz!” they yelled in my ears on both sides. “Hi!”

It took all my energy to keep myself from throwing off sparks in distress. I unclenched my gnarled fists and exhaled a whoosh of air while they hugged me instead. “Hello,” I stretched the long  _oh_  sound out as their arms tangled with the back of the chair. “Warren, Wesley.” I flailed one hand at Len. “This is your Uncle Lenny.”

That’s how they ended up giving him a four-armed hug before they flailed away to say hello to the aunts. Len tilted his head and held my gaze. “Uncle Lenny, hmm?”

“Well,” I shrugged, “you’re my husband and I’m their aunt, so by the transitive property…”

Len nodded, a slow descent of his chin. “Why do they call you ‘Aunt Kenz’?”

“Oh,” I giggled, “they couldn’t say ‘Mackenzie’ when they were little, so they called me ‘Aunt Kenz’ instead. I guess it stuck.”

“Cute.” Len idly swirled the black king between his fingers on the chessboard. “Are you sure you really want to leave all of this?”

“Yes,” I took his other hand in both of mine, “even if I had no way back. I’m all in too, y’know.”

Len quit playing with the black king and tangled his fingers in my hair as he leaned over the chessboard to kiss me. I kissed him back and both kings fell. I broke the kiss to scoop the fallen chess pieces up and tripped on thin air when I went around the corner of the ottoman. Len broke my fall by yanking me onto his lap and dug his fingers into my hip with a lovely sort of pressure. I flailed awkwardly while his thumb stroked the crease of my thigh. “Well, well, well,” he smirked and curled the fingers of his other hand around my shoulder, “you fell for me, hmm?”

I made garbage disposal noises at his terribad pun before I kissed him again. It was surreal as fuck to make out with him on this world, in this house, on this couch. I was shocked that I hadn’t caused another crisis in the multiverse by doing this—and by this, I meant introducing him to my parents interdimensionally, not kissing him—and no shady government organizations had noticed that I’d opened a wormhole in the backyard. I was probably the luckiest metahuman in the multiverse. Then again, it might be luckier if Mulder and Scully38 came to investigate my hypertime shenanigans and I got to meet the woman who made me realize I was into girls, along with Teri Hatcher as Lois Lane from  _Lois & Clark_, but I digress.39

I ended up making homemade vanilla ice cream to accompany the five cobblers, crisps, and crumbles that were made by my aunts: peach, apple, cherry, blackberry, and blueberry. I couldn’t eat homemade ice cream without vomiting anymore, but I was still the best at making it. Kel tried once and the ice melted. Then it got into the container so the finished product was sloppy with rock salt. Gross.

Len folded himself onto the concrete step beside me while the mixer churned and looked out at the water before his focus shifted onto me. “What do you want for your birthday?” he asked.

“Sex toys,” I deadpanned.

Len chuckled, delighted. “Really,” he stretched the word out into an innuendo.

I nodded. “If you want to keep doing butt stuff, then yes. I know you probably have way more experience than me with your butt, so pick out something you like and we’ll use it together.”

“That’s more of a gift for me,” Len pointed out. “I want to give you something that you want.”

I shrugged. “Then buy me a book I don’t have. That always works for me,” I told him, “maybe the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of  _The Divine Comedy_.”

Len arched his eyebrows and cocked his head. “Don’t you have two different translations of that at home?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I hedged, “one is annotated and one has the original Italian next to the English translation, but neither is the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition.”

“Such a librarian,” Len murmured, “my gift to you could be making that fantasy of yours a reality, hmm?”

That’s how we ended up breaking into the Poulsbo library after everyone else was asleep. I used my powers to keep us from getting caught. I’d spent most afternoons there when I was in junior high, reading comics and classic literature until my dad came to get me because that was better than taking the school bus home. I found myself a little bit reluctant to have sex in there. It felt profane, and not in a fun way. Also, I kept giggling and ruining the beginning of the scenario because watching Len come running into the library in his parka and goggles was hilarious for some reason. I hunched over the reference desk and laughed so hard my whole body shook. I didn’t notice he was in the chair behind me until he spoke.

“Mac,” Len said my name in that low, intimate voice and heat coiled below my belly. “Turn around.”

I did what he said, curling my hands over the edge of the desk for balance since my cane was elsewhere. Len hung his parka on the back of the chair before he took his gloves and goggles off. It was dark in the library, but soft lights illuminated the reference desk. I felt his eyes all over me, his gaze so heavy and heated that my heart flipped a little bit.

Len met my eyes and smirked. “Now strip for me,” he ordered, “slowly.”

I unbuttoned my dress and slipped the fabric off my shoulders. I’d never worn the lingerie I had on before. It was all black lace, the garter belt had triangle straps, the stockings had seams up the back, and I had on another thong he’d picked out because I knew we’d be doing this and I figured he’d like to see that. I was blushing so hard the infrared signature was probably visible from geostationary orbit. I bent to pick my dress up and folded it onto the desk before I unhooked my bra.

Len tilted his head to drag his gaze up and down my body. “Come here,” he told me.

I turned after I walked two steps to stand between his legs and sat on his lap with a soft whoosh of air.

Len smoothed his hands up from my waist to cup my breasts. “I can smell you,” he told me while he rubbed my nipples roughly between his thumbs and forefingers, “you’re so wet I could bend you over the desk and fuck you right now. I could take you from behind and make you come all over my cock,” he ground the hard length of him against me through his pants and I whimpered, “and you’d be such a slut for it that you’d stick your ass out and beg for me, hmm?” I moaned when he stroked the soaking wet crotch of the thong with one teasing fingertip. “Say it, Mac.”

“Yes,” I whispered, “if you fucked me from behind right now I’d be such a slut for it that I’d stick my ass out and beg for you to make me come all over your cock.”

Len slipped his fingers underneath the crotch of the thong and groaned at how slick I was. I let my head fall back against his shoulder and closed my eyes while he used his fingers to spread me open. Len crooked his fingers inside me while the forefingers of his other hand flicked my clit, stirring my cunt up slowly and meticulously until I was trembling and gasping his name.

“Oh,” I moaned and my hips bucked under his hands. “Len, please make me come.”

Len nuzzled my neck and nipped the skin behind my ear while I squirmed in his arms. “Tell me that you love me,” he ordered softly.

I whimpered as his fingers hit someplace inside me that induced a bright flare of pleasure. “I love you,” I told him, “and I’d say it even if you weren’t holding my orgasm hostage, you asshole—”

That’s when I came so hard sparks flew out from my fingers, which had been clutching at his forearms. I didn’t burn or mark him, though. I’d only zapped him a little. Len hissed at the sensation, but he didn’t stop fucking me with his fingers until I came again, hot on the heels of the first orgasm he’d given me. “I love you too,” he told me before he slipped his fingers out to suck my slick off them. “This is your fantasy,” he murmured into my ear. “Tell me what you want me to do with you now, Mrs. Snart.”

I stood up and walked two steps to bend myself over the reference desk. I was still trembling a little bit when I reached down between my legs and pushed the soaking wet scrap of lace aside. Len, meanwhile, stood and yanked his shirt over his head without bothering to take his pants off. I looked at him over my shoulder and propped my knee on the desk to keep my weight off my bad ankle. I was flushed and throbbing with how much I wanted him. I felt bolder than I ever had before and slutty in the best way. I wasn’t ashamed, not even a little bit. “I want you to fuck me from behind,” I told him softly, “and make me come again with your cock.”

“ _Yes_ ,” Len hissed. Then he grabbed my hips and thrust all the way inside me with one hard stroke. I moaned so loudly it was almost a scream when the head of his cock bumped my cervix and slowly moved my hips in swirls to meet his. Len pulled out until only the head of his cock was inside me before he thrust back in and he kept fucking me that way, hard and fast and deep, until I fell apart with a sharp, desperate sound and clenched tight around his cock. Len slumped onto the desk and braced himself on his elbows over me while his thrusts got sloppy with his own raw need. “Say my name,” he growled into my ear.

I looked at him over my shoulder and reached back to touch his face. “Len,” I gasped. “I love you. I love you so much.”

That’s when he came inside me with a low groan he buried in the space between my neck and shoulder. I tugged my bottom lip between my teeth and closed my eyes at the sensation of how warm it was, how full I felt. Len cradled the back of my head and pressed his forehead against mine. “I love you too,” he told me fervently. “Was this as good as you imagined?”

I shook my head slowly. “I never imagined you’d love me back,” I whispered. “That makes it even better than my fantasy.”

“I thought a lot about you after we danced that night,” Len murmured. “I watched you when I was casing the university. I lost focus and changed the plan because you were there when we broke into the special collections library. I thought about taking you hostage after we stole the  _Ehoiai_ fragments, but I couldn’t think of a way to justify that to Lisa. I knew not to touch the papyrus with my bare hands. I wanted to see if you would stop me,” he stroked my hair, “wanted to see what you were really made of. I wasn’t lying when I said I wanted to know you. I fantasized about you, too. ”

I was smiling when Len slipped out and put his clothes back on. I hooked my bra in the front and shuffled it around to the back and buttoned my dress up before I cleaned up the mess he’d left between my thighs and stuffed the used tissues into a plastic bag. Then I extracted a pack of disinfecting wipes from the abyss of my purse. I wiped down the desk and chair and put the wipes in the same bag. Then I checked the carpet underfoot for splatter. Len was smirking at me when I turned and looked up at him. “What?” I asked.

Len smirked wider. “You’re so cute,” he told me before he opened the door and held it for me. I used my powers to unloop the video feed in the parking lot after we drove away.

I yawned and propped my feet on the dashboard. “What’d you fantasize about?” I asked.

“I thought about you in the stacks,” Len kept his eyes on the road while he spoke, “you on your knees with my cock in your pretty mouth. I wondered if the possibility of getting caught sucking me off would make you wetter. I thought about lifting up those long skirts you wear and pushing your panties aside to taste your pretty cunt. I wondered if anyone had ever gone down on you before. I know some guys won’t do that and it seemed like you didn’t have much experience.”

I could practically feel him smirking in the shadows, his possessiveness showing even though I couldn’t see. “Okay,” I huffed, “they aren’t long skirts. I’m just not a tall person.”

“Mac,” Len side-eyed me, “some of your skirts cover your ankles.”

“Only a few,” I retorted, “most of them are knee-length or shorter.”

“I know.” Len grinned, a flash of teeth in the dark. “I like those sexy little knee socks you wear. I thought about them in jail.”

“Oh.” I wore the knee socks because those were sheer and my feet tended to sweat profusely in socks that weren’t. Which was also why I spent most of the year in orthopedic sandals with no socks, but he didn’t need to know any of that. “So you like the knee socks better than the stockings?” I wondered.

Len shook his head slowly. “Nah,” he parked in front of my parents’ house and turned to smirk at me again, “the stockings are sexy too. You’re sexy, Mac. I like you in thigh-highs and garters and lingerie, you know I do, but that’s not what makes you sexy. You’re smart. You’re funny. You’re powerful, but practical too. You’re warmhearted, but still you understand that being coldblooded is sometimes necessary. You’re perfect for me. You’d be sexy in anything.”

I waited until we were in the bedroom again before I grabbed the lapel of his parka and pulled him down to kiss him. Len curled his fingers into my hips and squeezed hard enough to bruise. I nipped his bottom lip, then skimmed my tongue over where my teeth had been. Len moaned low in his throat and slipped his tongue into my mouth to kiss me deeper. I was breathless when he broke the kiss to bite my earlobe.

“Want to go again?” Len asked in that low, intimate voice.

I shivered at the sensation of his breath heavy and heated against my ear. I might’ve also whimpered a little bit. “I might be too sore for more rough sex,” I whispered, “and gentle is not your jam.”

“That’s true.” Len took his hands off me and shucked his parka before he undressed. I crawled into bed with him after I stripped off my dress and underthings. Len pulled me down on top of him after I took off my glasses and leaned over his body to put them on the desk. “Well,” he murmured, “I can take it nice and slow if you ride me, hmm?”

“Oh,” I arched my eyebrows at him. “So you want me to do all of the work? Not cool, Captain Cold.”

Len undid the clip in my hair so it could keep my glasses company on the desk and fisted one hand in the frizzy tendrils at the nape of my neck. “I am the epitome of all things that are cool,” he deadpanned.

“Yeah,” I stretched the word out awkwardly while I moved to straddle him, “keep telling yourself that, loser.”

Len actually looked offended by the implication that he wasn’t the epitome of all things cool until I lowered myself along his shaft and took his cock in one slow grind that ended with my hips against his. I tugged my bottom lip between my teeth to stifle a moan. I was still a little bit oversensitized from before. Len hissed and I felt him force himself not to thrust up into me. I dug my fingers into the nape of his neck and bent to lick the hollow under the hinge of his jawbone. “Mac,” he grit his teeth and his jaw clenched around my name, “I need…”

“It’s okay,” I told him softly, “please move. I want you to fuck me.”

“ _Yes_.” Len hissed back and fucked up into me hard enough to make the mattress screech at the impact. I used my knees for leverage and moved with him until we found a rhythm that worked for us. It felt so good my spine arched back. Len kissed my throat and took his time sucking a bruise into the skin above my clavicle while he cupped my breasts and teased my nipples. I squirmed and felt him rubbing around deep inside me. I clung to his shoulders and started to ride him harder.

Len scraped his teeth over the pulse thundering under the skin of my neck and tugged on my nipples hard enough to make me moan. “Tell me that you’re mine,” he growled in my ear. “Say it, Mac.”

“I’m yours,” I gasped, “but I don’t belong to you. I belong to myself.”

That said, I ground my clit against his pubic bone until I came on his cock. Len groaned and fucked up into me before he spun to pin me under him. I covered my mouth with my palm while he fucked me into the mattress through the aftershocks. Len cradled the back of my head as he pulled out until only the head of his cock was inside of me. “Look at me,” he ordered.

I opened my eyes and moved my hips to meet his when he thrust all the way back in. Len held my gaze while he fucked me slowly and heat coiled below my belly, the buildup to another orgasm twisting inside me like a sweet ache.

“Oh,” I whimpered, “Len…”

That’s when he came and it was so intense he collapsed onto me, his whole body on top of mine, his face buried in the mess he’d made of my hair while his cock went soft inside me. I smoothed my hands over his back and nuzzled his shoulder while he made hoarse little noises and shook in my arms.

“I love you,” I told him softly.

Len kissed my chin. “I love you too,” he untangled the hand he’d fisted in my hair and cupped my face while he met my eyes, “you were close when I came, hmm?”

I nodded. “It’s okay,” I yawned and covered my mouth with my bad hand. “I don’t need another orgasm.”

“We’ll see about that,” Len retorted before he crawled down my body to kneel between my legs.

“Len,” I whispered, “you don’t have to—”

That’s when he worked three fingers inside me and spread them so fast my hips jerked violently. I covered my mouth with my hands to muffle a harsh, loud whine. I knew the sheets were going to end up stained—his come must’ve splattered all over after that—but I didn’t care because his thumb was rubbing my clit and my cunt was full of his long, clever fingers and I was so close it hurt a little bit.

“I want to,” Len said with slow vehemence. “I like making you come. I love being the only man who’s ever given this to you,” he crooked his fingers to hit my g-spot and I stifled a shrill noise, “and when you’re in bed with me, you’re  _mine_. Not the goddess of Central City. Not misconstrued as being married to the Flash,” his thumb rubbed sideways back and forth over my clit and I drooled on the heel of my hand a little bit, “right now you’re  _my_ wife,  _my_ goddess, you’re all  _mine_.”

Len quit talking after that and made me come so hard stars fell behind my eyelids. I returned to earth when he gently wiped up the semen trickling from my cunt along my perineum with a wad of tissues. I hadn’t even noticed him cleaning up the mess we’d made on the sheets while he was fingering me. That’s how good the orgasm was.

I winced at how oversensitive I was in the aftermath. Len splayed one hand over my belly and stroked my flabby stomach with his cold fingers. “Sorry,” he murmured.

I could hear the smirk in his voice. I opened my eyes and squinted at him. “Liar,” I whispered. Len grinned and kissed my forehead. I snuggled closer to him until my whole body was squished against his. “Thank you,” I told him softly, “for my birthday present.”

“You,” Len said in that low intimate voice, “are so very welcome.”

In hindsight, I should’ve told him that he was perfect for me too. It might’ve saved us oodles of trouble in the future.

Or, the past.

Or, our future in the past.

Or, the past in our future.

Modern syntax got a little wibbly-wobbly when describing timey-wimey stuff, okay?40

(Wait for it.)

* * *

I went downtown the next day because I wanted ice cream. Specifically chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream from Hotshots Java. Len drove me there to get us both out of the house. I knew something was bothering him from the furrow in his brow, the set of his jaw, the fidgets in his hands.

Len noticed how anxious his agitation was making me and heaved a sigh. “I’m not mad at you,” he said, “but your family’s too nice. It’s kind of freaking me out.”

What he meant by that was,  _they’re nice and I’m not. What is someone like you doing with a guy like me?_

Here’s the thing: I was raised upper middle class by two psychologists in a nice house on the waterfront. It wasn’t perfect, but I was loved unconditionally. I was raped and bullied and queer and I felt alone for my whole adolescence, but I was never really alone. I went through years of having no friends and years of hating the entire world, including myself, but my parents were always there for me. I had great parents, the best parents, and that was something Len didn’t know about me until he met them.

Barry had told Len that he didn’t have to let his past define him, but meeting my family only showed him how different we really were. Which made him focus on the past. Which brought up all of the unpleasant memories associated with his good for nothing father. Which made him doubt that he could make me happy. Len didn’t tell me when he was feeling weak or unsure, though, so I had no idea any of this was going through his head.

Anyhow.

“If it’s a coffee shop,” Len eyed the sign above the door, “why does it sell ice cream?”

“I have no idea,” I shrugged and shifted my weight onto my cane, “but it’s my favorite.”

Len paid for the ice cream, which was sweet in the literal and figural sense of the phrase, and I was eyeing the bookstore next to Hotshots when I glanced across the street and froze. Daniel Fletcher, my rapist, was there—he was just walking down the sidewalk, but that was enough to make me stop breathing.

“Mac,” Len smoothed his palm along my spine through my dress, “your ice cream is melting.”

“I can’t breathe,” I whispered. I couldn’t hear my own voice over the hammering of my heartbeat, but I must’ve sounded bad.

Len narrowed his eyes and shifted his gaze to follow mine across the street. “That’s him,” he growled, “isn’t it?”

I knew he didn’t have a gun—cold or otherwise—but he did have a knife in his boot and I wouldn’t have put it past him to stab Daniel in the middle of the street. There was also a part of me that wanted him to stab my rapist in the middle of the street, but I ignored it. I stopped hyperventilating and licked up the drips that had trickled down the side of my cone.

“I’m going to kill him,” Len snarled. “I’m going to take him apart.”

“Len,” I ate the end of my cone and tucked my cane in the crook of my elbow before I tugged on the sleeve of his t-shirt, “did I ever tell you why I got the tattoo on my shoulder?”

Len shifted his focus to me and folded his arms. “No,” he murmured, “you didn’t.”

“I got it seven years after I was raped,” I told him softly, “science says every seven years all your flesh is new again because you’ve shed your skin and grown new cells. I got it because I finally had a body he’d never touched. Len, you’re the only man to ever touch the body I have now. I’m yours, okay? I’m all yours, so please don’t—”

That’s when he cupped my face in both hands and kissed me like we were the only two people in the multiverse, all heat and tingling and with a hint of teeth. Suddenly I was breathless for a totally different reason: because his kiss was so hard and so deep I forgot to breathe. I was gasping when he broke the kiss and pressed his forehead against mine.

“I still want to kill him,” Len growled. “I still want to take him apart for what he did to you.”

“I know,” I whispered. “There’s a part of me that really wants you to,” I exhaled a loud whoosh of air, “just not enough to watch you stab him while we’re on a date in the middle of downtown Poulsbo. Cool?”

Len grit his teeth and his jaw clenched around the word, “Cool.”

“Thank you,” I told him softly. “I love you.”

“I love you more,” Len said with slow vehemence. I nuzzled his nose with mine. I knew he didn’t mean that he loved me more than I loved him. Len meant that he loved me more than he wanted to kill my rapist. That was good enough for me.

* * *

I married him again a day after my twenty-fifth birthday, which—due to interdimensional shenanigans—was also pretty much my twenty-seventh birthday. I got side-eyed by the women in the Lowell clan, all of whom had kept the surname Lowell after they married their respective husbands. I understood the feminist impulse, but my maiden name was as long as the alphabet. I didn’t need to make it longer by adding his surname to mine instead of overwriting the Harper-Lowell hyphenate with it. That was just overkill.

Anyhow.

I spent the week before the ceremony low-key avoiding my mom because she’d decided to cram a years’ worth of wedding planning into two weeks to give me the wedding she’d always wanted her daughter to have. Senna always used to say my mom burned the candle at six ends. If anyone could plan a wedding in two weeks, it would be her. I figured since I was moving to another dimension after my birthday, I could give her my dream wedding. I took myself out of the equation because I didn’t want to rain on her nuptial parade.

Trouble was, taking yourself out of the equation wasn’t feasible when you’re the bride. I got to pick my dress because I had to wear it. I got to pick the food because I had dietary restrictions due to medical problems. I got to pick the cake because I had to eat it. I invited my three best friends—Cat, Kat, and Nicole—and my mom knew I didn’t want anyone else who wasn’t family to come. That’s where my involvement in the wedding planning ended. Luckily my mom wanted to plan the whole shebang and officiate the ceremony. This way everybody won.

Here’s the thing: it was exactly as stressful as I thought it would be. I was screaming internally the whole day. I hid in the bedroom with my snit until I had to stand up with my husband in front of the entire Lowell family and make my vows all over again. Lisa drank a whole bottle of pink champagne by herself. Louise drank another one and she couldn’t even drink legally. I couldn’t drink, but I had brought my tiny pill case with my antianxiety meds inside. I only took half a pill under ordinary circumstances, but my prescription said I was allowed to take a whole pill if I needed to. That’s what I did. I also drank a whole bottle of sparkling cider to get rid of the bad taste and burped very loudly in the aftermath. Don’t judge me.

Len didn’t bother to wait for my mom to say he could kiss me after we said “I do.” Instead he grabbed my hair and gave me a kiss so meticulous my toes curled. I felt suddenly calm, and it wasn’t just my meds kicking in. I didn’t lie when I said I had everything I wanted.

I remembered another part of that old wedding superstition:  _married in white, you’ve chosen right_. 41

* * *

**Scene VI**  
Freedom to Live 

* * *

Saf brought us back to Earth-1 a few minutes after we’d left. I checked my phone and it reminded me that I had my infusion in half an hour. Whoops.

I shuffled into our bedroom and changed out of the wedding gown, which was an ivory confection with a lace front busk corset and a floaty skirt of ruffled organza. I hadn’t worn a bra underneath, because the corset rendered a bra unnecessary. I also had three inch heels on that had kept the skirt from touching the freshly mown grass in the backyard.

I was hanging the dress up when Len pressed the line of his body against mine and smoothed his hands up from my waist to cup my breasts. I squeaked and fumbled the hanger. Len chuckled and rubbed slow circles over my nipples with his thumbs, flicking the nubs once they were hard so I squirmed in his arms. I whimpered at the friction and hung the dress up before I turned to look at him. Len dragged his gaze along my body to meet my eyes. I had on off-white thigh-highs and see-through satin panties strategically paneled with a creamy froth of off-white lace, so that didn’t help.

Len grinned, baring his teeth, and looked at me like I was lovelier than any piece of hifalutin art or precious gem he’d ever stolen. “Hello, Mrs. Snart.”

“Nope,” I made shooing gesticulations at him with my hands, “I have to go suppress my immune system. No sex until I get back.”

“Sure.” Len shucked his tuxedo jacket and vest in one smooth motion while I clasped my comfy bra—which had no underwire—in the front and shuffled it around to the back. “I can drive you.”

That’s how we ended up changing out of our formalwear and into clothes of a more comfortable variety before he drove me into the city for my infusion. I had difficult veins, and he was glowering after the nurse failed to find one twice because he knew how easily I bruised. I’d forgotten why I never brought him with me to do medical things: because pain was a constant for me and he hated it with the fire of a thousand suns. Mick was unequivocally the flame to his frost, but I made him burn. I loved that.

I didn’t love how he was glaring at the nurse, though. I rolled my eyes at him as I held the infrared device that illuminated the veins underneath my skin by harsh red light and winced as the nurse drew blood for my monthly tests.

Len folded his arms while I watched the blood flow out from my arm. “I forget you’re sick,” he told me softly after the nurse left to take my blood samples to the lab for tests and procure my infusion from the pharmacist who made it for me. “I forget that you need to suppress your immune system every four weeks or you would get worse.”

This was another reason why I didn’t bring him with me to do medical things: because I didn’t want him to see me as an invalid. “Hey,” I booped his thigh with my foot because my hands couldn’t reach, “my course of treatment stopped the progression of the RA before I knew you. I’m not going to get worse. I’m chronically ill, not terminally ill. I’m not dying,” I booped him again in warning before he moved to sit on the stool beside me, “please don’t treat me like I am.”

Len smiled without baring his teeth and smoothed one hand along my elevated leg to curl his fingers into where my knee met my thigh. I took a book out of my purse and flipped to my bookmark, a magnetic purple monster clipped onto the page we’d stopped at. “Where were we?” he asked as his thumb idly swirled over the knob of my kneecap.

I flipped the open book over my other knee and squeezed his hand. Len cupped my face in his other hand and stole a kiss so sweet it made my heart clench horribly inside my chest. I had to force myself not to reach out for him with my other hand because my forearm had a needle stuck inside it. Len broke the kiss after the nurse returned with my meds, but he didn’t stop touching me. Instead he picked up the book and held it open for me because I couldn’t use both hands. I read out loud to him until the machine connected to the IV beeped to inform us that my infusion was done.

Len kept one hand on me the whole time while I made my next appointment at the check-in desk and shuffled out to the parking lot. I had just buckled my seatbelt when he slipped his hand under my skirt to cup me through my bridal panties. Len rubbed me slowly through my underwear while he pulled out of the handicapped space in front of the clinic and drove away. I spread my legs and clung to his forearm with one hand as his fingertips dug into my wet hole.

“Len,” I whimpered, “don’t you need two hands to drive?”

“No,” Len said, “but I can stop if that’s what you want, hmm?”

“Oh,” I moaned and my hips jerked without my permission from the friction of his fingertips against the satin, “don’t stop, tease me more, please…”

Len inhaled sharply. “You’re too _cute_ ,” he bit down around the word and exhaled a frustrated gust of air. I knew he wasn’t frustrated with me, though—he was frustrated because he couldn’t do what he wanted from behind the wheel.

“You love me,” I said.

“Yeah.” Len found my clit and rubbed a slow circle over the hard nub with one fingertip. “I do,” he said fervently. “I love that you trust me enough to let me touch you like this.”

“I do,” I told him. “I trust you, Len. I love you, too.”

Len grinned, baring his teeth in my periphery. “Good,” he murmured before he quit touching me and parked in front of our house. Lisa had gone, which I knew by the absence of her motorcycle, Louise was at CCU with Jesse, and I figured Anna was at S. T. A. R. Labs. Len opened the door for me and smirked when he noticed how flushed I was. “After you,” he said in that low, intimate voice.

I was hanging my purse and sweater up when he unzipped my dress and peeled it off my shoulders before he unclasped my bra with his teeth. I stepped out of my dress and toed my shoes off, using my cane for balance. It clattered to the floor when he grabbed my hips and turned me around so I was up against the wall and he was on his knees before me.

“You’re so wet.” Len grinned and stroked the crotch of my bridal panties with greedy fingers. “You really do like to be teased, hmm?”

I nodded because he knew the answer to his question, but he wanted to hear me say it out loud. “Yes,” I told him. “I like it when you tease me. I come harder when you draw things out, y’know—”

That’s when Len crooked his fingertips and my knees buckled as pleasure coiled and compacted below my belly. I was trembling all through my hips and thighs, my face was flushed, and I could feel his eyes all over me. It was overwhelming how turned on I was. I felt lit up, electrified without inductance, with a surge inside me while his cold hands were on the outside—like a ground wire keeping me connected to the earth.

I came so hard I yelped when he kissed the crotch of my panties and sucked on my clit through the soaking wet satin. I made little helpless noises while Len rose to cup my face in both hands. “Look at me,” he whispered.

I opened my eyes and smoothed my bad hand up along his chest to press my palm over his heart. “Hi,” I whispered back.

Len smiled and my heart skipped like a record scratching on a turntable. It felt that loud, from where I stood. “Hi there,” he said before he cradled the back of my head and stole the oxygen from my lungs with his kiss. It got slick and filthy when I flicked my tongue under his, osculating sideways to lick the folds and frenulum there. Len growled low in his throat and kissed me harder. I clung to his head and moaned into his mouth. Len quit touching my face to cup my breasts, filling his hands with me and digging his fingers into my flesh with a lovely sort of pressure.

I let my hands linger over the facets of his shoulders, back, and stomach before I undid his fly and pulled his pants down. Len groaned and broke the kiss after I wrapped my thumbs and forefingers around the base of his cock and moved them up and down to make him more sensitive. I smiled when he thrust into my hands and buried a moan in the space between my neck and shoulder. I took my hands off him and nipped the hollow under his jawbone. Len made a raw, frustrated noise in protest.

“Okay,” I stroked his short hair and kissed the arch of his left eyebrow, “we need to move. I can’t stand up anymore. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Len nuzzled my neck and rose until he wasn’t hunched over me anymore. “I’m actually surprised you’re not taking a nap right now.”

I was surprised too, actually. After my infusions, I either took a nap or acquired a whole cheese pizza and then ate it all before I took a nap. Len knew me well enough to know that even though he didn’t normally accompany me to my infusions or any of the other medical crap I did.

“I want you to make me come again with your cock first,” I told him, “but we can take a nap together after that if you want.”

Len chuckled, delighted that I was asking for what I wanted from him. “Yeah,” he smirked at me. “I can give all of that to you, Mrs. Snart.”

That’s when he swept me off my feet, literally. I squawked and threw my arms tight around his neck automatically, my breasts squishing against his chest as I flailed. I expected him to take me back to bed. Instead he put me down beside the couch and splayed his fingers over the small of my back. I blushed as he bent me over the arm of the couch so my ass was in the air.

Len crouched behind me and took off my panties. I made a needy little noise when he licked the base of my spine and looked over my shoulder at him. Len grinned, and it was _filthy_ , in the best way. “Spread your legs for me,” he ordered in that low intimate voice. “Show me your pretty cunt.”

I flopped onto my elbows and spread my thighs apart. I was short enough that my feet didn’t touch the floor in this position. Len grabbed my hips and kissed my cunt the same way he kissed my mouth, like my folds were another pair of lips, and my toes curled in midair at the flutter of his tongue licking into me. I was sore after all the sex we’d been having and he took it slow, applying the precision he used for pulling jobs to giving me such great head I actually cried a little bit when I came.

Len smoothed his hands up from my hips to sweep my hair aside. It slithered across one shoulder as he kissed my neck and flicked his tongue over a particularly sensitive place behind my ear. “I need to be inside of you,” he murmured.

I shivered at the heat of his breath and squirmed under him so the head of his cock rubbed up against my hole. “Yes,” I said.

“Say please,” Len ordered. “Beg me for it, Mac.”

“ _Oh_ ,” I whimpered as the length of him slid in a slow grind between my folds to brush my swollen clit. “Len, take me now, please—”

That’s when he gave me what I wanted and took me slowly, his girth working me open as the underside of his cock hit my g-spot with every meticulous thrust. I moaned when he bumped my cervix and kept rubbing that place deep inside me instead of pulling out. Len dragged his hands from my shoulders to cup my breasts and tease my nipples, flicking the hard nubs with his fingertips and swirling his thumbs over my areolae. I unspooled into a hot mess: gooey and warm and with no thoughts inside my head except _fuck, yes, good_. I oozed, cozy and full of light, and generated a low voltage of electricity in the aftershocks of the mindblowing orgasm he’d given me. Len grit his teeth and exhaled a sharp, raw noise when he came. I took one of his hands to kiss his fingers as his whole body shuddered on top of mine. Len turned my head to kiss me over my shoulder, the angle making it sloppy and slick and perfect.

“Okay,” I broke the kiss and nuzzled his nose with mine. “Here’s my plan: first naptime, then dinnertime. Cool?”

Len grinned and stole another kiss; one so hot I felt it, incongruously, everywhere. “Cool,” he told me softly.

Meanwhile, a time ship from a century and a half in the future landed in present day Star City. Ripley Michael Carter (alias: Rip Hunter) had arrived to assemble a team of heroes and villains whose stories would become legends after they averted the darkest timeline in which Vandal Savage ruled the world.42

(Wait for it.)

* * *

1\. Heatstroke is an alias used by a futuristic knockoff of Mick who first appears in _Flash_ Vol.3, No.1 (“Case One: The Dastardly Deaths of the Rogues”) June, 2010.

2\. **Death by Origin Story** : ([x](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathByOriginStory)).

3\. Ryan Choi first appeared in _Brave New World_ Vol.1, No.1 (“Handle of the Teacup”) August, 2006. Anna Choi is a female version of Ryan Choi. I also partially based her on Ray’s late fiancée, who is first mentioned in _Arrow_ 3x09 (“The Climb”) 10 December 2014 and first appears in _Legends of Tomorrow_ 1x12 (“Last Refuge”) 21 April 2015.

4\. Rhonda Pineda first appeared in _Aquaman_ Vol.7, No.16 (“Throne of Atlantis, Part 4”) March, 2013.

5\. Ivy University first appeared in _Atom_ Vol.1, No.3 (“The Time Trap!”) November, 1962 and the Lighter Than Air Society first appeared in _Brave New World_ Vol.1, No.1 (“Handle of the Teacup”) August, 2006.

6\. David and Susan Palmer are Ray’s parents. Daniel Palmer is his brother, and they all first appeared in _Power of the Atom_ Vol.1, No.6 (“Time, Time, Time - See What’s Become of Me”) December, 1988.

7\. _Miss Congeniality_ (2001).

8\. Ivy Town is Ray’s hometown. It first appeared in _Showcase_ Vol.1, No.34 (“Birth of the Atom!”) October, 1961.

9\. Grant Morrison and Mark Waid created the concept of hypertime in _The Kingdom_ (1999).

10\. _Monty Python and the Holy Grail_ (1975).

11\. Luna Nurblin first appeared in _Flash_ Vol.1, No.310 (“Colonel Computron Strikes Back - With a Vengeance”) June, 1982.

12\. Velocity 9 was a drug created by Vandal Savage in the comics that first appeared in _Flash_ Vol.2, No.12 (“Velocity 9”) May, 1988.

13\. Marvel’s _Jessica Jones_ 1x08 (“AKA WWJD?”) 20 November 2015.

14\. William Shakespeare, _Romeo & Juliet_ (1597) II.vi.1467-73.

15\. William Shakespeare, _Romeo & Juliet_ (1597) I.v.733-7.

16\. Zinda Blake first appeared in _Blackhawk_ Vol.1, No.133 (“The Human Dynamo”) February, 1959.

17\. Alfred Hitchcock popularized the term “MacGuffin” (i.e. a plot device to motivate characters and advances the story) with his film _The 39 Steps_ (1935).

18\. Taylor Swift, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” from _Red_ (2012).

19\. Carl Douglas, “Kung Fu Fighting” from _Kung Fu Fighting and Other Great Love Songs_ (1974).

20\. Eric Russell first appeared in _Flash_ Vol.1, No.203 (“The Flash’s Wife is a Two-Timer!”) February, 1971.

21\. Bridget, a fulgurkinetic with no canonical surname, first appeared in _Major Bummer_ Vol.1, No.1 (“What the Hell?!”) August, 1997.

22\. If you want to mix those feminist cocktails, here ([x](http://www.buzzfeed.com/lukebailey/feminist-cocktails)) are some recipes.

23\. Joshua Clay first appeared in _Showcase_ Vol.1, No.94 (“The Doom Patrol Lives Forever!”) September, 1977.

24\. Arani Desai first appeared in _Showcase_ Vol.1, No.94 (“The Doom Patrol Lives Forever!”) September, 1977.

25\. Rhea Jones first appeared in _Doom Patrol_ Vol.2. No.3 (“The Fire of the Gods!”) December, 1987.

26\. Penny van Camp appeared in _Blackhawk_ Vol.1, No.182 (“The Festival of Fear”) March, 1963.

27\. Alfred Eisenstaedt, “V-J Day in Times Square” (1945) first published in _Life_ magazine.

28\. Christina Alexandrova first appeared in _Flash_ Vol.2, No.7 (“Red Trinity”) December, 1987.

29\. Dr. Seuss, _How the Grinch Stole Christmas!_ (1957).

30\. _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ 5x17 (“Forever”) 17 April 2001.

31\. Seanan McGuire, _Discount Armageddon_ (2012) #1 in the _InCryptid_ series.

32\. _Mean Girls_ (2004).

33\. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” from _Leaves of Grass_ (1855).

34\. Elton John, “Circle of Life” from _The Lion King_ (1991).

35\. Adam Mansbach, _Go the Fuck to Sleep_ (2011).

36\. Roscoe Dillon first appeared in _Flash_ Vol.1, No.122 (“Beware the Atomic Grenade!”) August, 1961.

37\. Sigrid Nansen first appeared in _Infinity, Inc._ Vol.1, No.32 (“You Can Call Me Psycho!”) November, 1986.

38\. _The X-Files_ (1993-2002).

39\. _Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman_ (1993-1997).

40\. _Doctor Who_ 3x10 (“Blink”) 9 June 2007.

41\. Alexander Polson, _Our Highland Folklore Heritage_ (1926).

42\. Rip Hunter first appeared in _Showcase_ Vol.1, No.20 (“Prisoners of 100 Million BC”) June, 1959.


	4. The Emanation

**I don’t have to  
pretend to be so interested in your ongoing tragedy,**

**but**

**I’ll rob the bank that gave you the impression that**  
**money is more fruitful than words, and  
**I’ll cut holes in the ozone if it means you have one less day of rain.****

Lucas Regazzi, “Small”

* * *

Shock Value  
**Part 1**  
_A Book of Myths in Which Our Names Do Not Appear_  
**Act IV**  
The Emanation

* * *

**Legend** , _n_.

1\. A short, episodic, highly eco-typified, historicized narrative performed in a conversational mode, reflecting on a psychological level a symbolic representation of collective experiences and serving as a reaffirmation of commonly held values.

2\. A narrative of human actions that are perceived to take place within human history and to possess certain qualities that give the tale verisimilitude.

3\. Stories which operate within the realm of uncertainty, never being entirely believed by the participants, but also never being resolutely doubted.

* * *

**Scene I**  
From Psychology to Metaphysics 

* * *

This is what I’ve been telling you to wait for in all those parentheticals, because what happened in hypertime changed everything for Len and me. Also the world of Earth-1 and, y’know, all of time and space, everything that ever happened or ever would.1

Anyhow.

I put a scan of the first composition book I filled in Gideon’s digital archive. I started a new composition book, one that I’d bought from the SU campus bookstore on Earth-33 with a honeycomb and bees cover. I was going to scan it too once it was full. I assumed somebody would read it someday. I figured I should tell my story in my own words if I was going to become a legend whose existence was debated by scholars in the future, but more on that later.

Len was pulling a job with Mick when Rip went all Agent Ecks on them.2 I used Google Earth to show a picture of the rooftop to Shawna and we teleported over there before he arrived with a motley slew of superheroes and supervillains. Shawna had never teleported so far away, but I didn’t want Saf to do it unless I had to. I figured a picture would suffice to get Shawna from point A (Central City) to point B (Star City). Apparently my theory that a visual aid of someplace far away worked as well as seeing a place in her sightline was correct. I loved being right.

I watched the jump ship land. It was in stealth mode, but when I traced the connection to a larger ship elsewhere I felt another Gideon and a strange interface unlike any piece of technology I’d ever booped with my brain, except the Time Sphere. Rip hadn’t built the Waverider, but he’d tinkered with it until it was more his than anything else.

I asked Gideon a question, testing a theory, and then the hatch opened. I pinged the cold gun as Rip emerged from the jump ship, and I used my powers to get them out so he wouldn’t be dragging them by their arms one by one.

Rip tensed and drew his revolver, whirling to face me, his duster flaring dramatically.

I snorted. “I’m fulgurkinetic,” I told him, “and that gun is made of pure energy and metal. It’s not going to work against me.”

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m Mackenzie Snart.” I shifted my weight off my bad ankle. “I’m from the future, like you. Oh, and a parallel universe. Also,” I flailed one hand at Len, “I’m married to him.”

Rip kept his revolver aimed between my eyes. “Captain Cold never married,” he insisted. “I would know.”

“Yeah,” I shrugged, “you were a Time Master once, so I’m sure you’re familiar with chaos theory, because it was literally your job to surgically alter the deterministic system of this world. Let’s just say I’m the butterfly effect.”

“How do you know I’m not a Time Master anymore?” Rip demanded.

“I was born in a reality where you’re a fictional character,” I said.

Rip nodded more to himself than me. “Earth-33,” his eyes narrowed at me as he followed the premise of that logic to a conclusion, “you’re Lady Zeus.”

“Yes,” I nodded. “Yes, I am.”

Rip exhaled a rueful laugh. “There’s an ongoing scholarly debate about you in the future,” he said, “about whether or not you were responsible for the animosity between Captain Cold and the Flash, about whether Lady Zeus existed at all.”

I gestured at myself and sparks flew out from my fingers. “Well,” I snuffed them out before they scorched the rooftop, “‘dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum.’”

“‘I doubt,’” Rip murmured, “‘therefore I think, therefore I am.’ Often wrongfully attributed to seventeenth century philosopher René Descartes, but in actuality—”3

“Descartes wrote his discourse in French,” I interjected, “‘je pense, donc de suis.’ I think, therefore I exist. Antoine Léonard Thomas coined the Latin phrase approximately a century later, but I digress. I know everything that happens next. I know everything that can—and will—go wrong on your kamikaze mission to kill Vandal Savage for what he did to your family in the second blitz of 2166. I promise to help you avoid the mistakes you haven’t made yet if you give me what I want.”4

Rip looked down at my unconscious husband and back at me. “If you want to take his place—”

I scoffed. “Nope,” I popped the _p_ sound. “There’s someone I want to save. Gideon told me she exists in the future you’re trying to prevent, so before that happens, I’m going to borrow your TARDIS…” I gnawed on the inside of my cheek, “…I mean time ship…and save her.” 5

Rip opened his mouth to ask me who exactly I wanted to save, but then everyone he abducted woke up.

Len noticed the professor first. “Stein,” he groaned. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I’m as ignorant as you,” Martin grumbled, “for once.”

“Where are we?” Sara asked.

“Why don’t you ask the dude who knocked us out and kidnapped us? British dude with a flashy thing,” Jax gesticulated sluggishly while he spoke, “ringing any bells?”

“Yeah,” I shuffled over to Len after he and Mick got back on their feet, “that would be Rip Hunter.”

Len moved to put himself in between Rip and me. I couldn’t decide whether I appreciated that or resented it. I could protect myself. I had fulgurkinetic superpowers, for crying out loud.

“I’m from East London,” Rip explained. “Oh, and the future.”

Len interlaced his fingers and mine while he touched the cold gun with his other hand. It wasn’t cool to the touch, which told him that he shouldn’t bother drawing his weapon. I squeezed his hand and shifted my weight off my ankle as I moved closer to him. Len squeezed back—very gently, because he knew it was my bad hand he was holding—and focused his attention on Rip.

“Nice to meet you, Rip.” Mick sneered and reached for his gun.

“Ah,” said Rip, “while you were incapacitated, I may have tampered with your weapons. I’ve assembled you all because I need your help,” he walked dramatically along the line of his recruits and me, “the future is in peril because of a man by the name of Vandal Savage.”

Len inhaled sharply and grit his teeth, inducing tension along his shoulders and in his jawline. I felt his grip on my hand clutch tighter and leaned my head against his upper arm, nuzzling through the sleeve of his parka. That calmed him down, and no one noticed he’d lost his cool for a second there except me.

Carter and Kendra exchanged an incredulous look. “That can’t be,” he said, “we destroyed him.”

“Team Arrow and Team Flash helped us do it,” Kendra added.

“Yeah,” I stretched the _ah_ sound out awkwardly, “about that.”

I hadn’t told anyone that Malcolm Merlyn was going to revive our big bad. I’d figured murdering Savage at that particular point in time would’ve changed the future, but it wouldn’t have changed the evil he’d done in the past. I didn’t want to take any chances. Or make things worse, for that matter.

“Unless you or Mr. Hall deliver the deathblow,” Rip explained, “Savage can be restored from but a single cell.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Mick demanded to know.

“Vandal’s immortal,” Carter explained, “Kendra and I reincarnate.”

“Yeah,” Sara nodded. “I’ve done that.”

“What the hell does this Randall guy have to do with us?” Mick asked, his tone harsh.

“Well,” Len tilted his head and enunciated the _l_ sound, his tongue flicking against his teeth, “he did bring down a church while Mac was inside.”

Mick side-eyed me. “Since when do you go to church?” he wondered.

“I don’t,” I told him. “I’ve been to church twice and I’m never, ever going back. Nothing good happens to me in churches. I got told I was going to hell the first time I went. Which is probably true _now_ , but when I was twelve, it wasn’t—”

“Vandal,” Rip interjected with a huff, “will employ the evil he’s perfected over his long life and the power he has amassed throughout history to finally conquer the world. I’ve been tasked with assembling an elite team to stop him.”

Sara folded her arms. “How?”

Rip raised one arm like he was reaching for the stars. I knew the jump ship was there in stealth mode, but no one else did, so his dramatic pose looked silly out of context. “To travel through time,” he said. “To capture Savage before he grows into the monster he becomes.”

That’s when my husband decided to walk out. I ruined the dramatic exit somewhat because he was holding my hand and he went around Rip instead of going between him and the lineup to avoid touching anyone but me.

“You got the wrong guy,” Len told Rip, “hero ain’t on my résumé.”

I’d only heard him use the word “ain’t” when he was nervous. I wanted to kiss him, but this wasn’t the time or place for that.

“Or mine.” Mick followed us, moving between Rip and the others, his bulk making it awkward.

“I know it’s difficult for you to fathom,” Rip said as Len stopped cold to listen, “but where—when—I’m from, the year 2166, you, and everyone on this roof, none of you are just considered heroes.”

Then he dropped the legendary bomb, which was where things got plot-holed—like pigeonholed, but with a plot—for me. Rip told them they weren’t legends after he brought them to the seventies, told them they didn’t matter, but then how exactly did he know about them? Like, did Time Masters keep files on everyone who ever lived? Was there an archive somewhere that had information on everybody who’d ever existed or would eventually exist? Or was he lying when he said they were legends, but also lying when he said they were the antithesis of legendary? It didn’t make sense.

I didn’t say that out loud, though.

“I hate to nitpick,” Martin spoke up, “but doesn’t a legend have to be dead?”

“Yeah,” Jax backed away while Martin stepped forward, “see, that’s a dealbreaker for me, so I’m gonna pass.”

Rip gave me a pointed look. “It’s dangerous for any of you to know too much about your own futures,” he said before he turned to face the halves of Firestorm, “but I am here because each of you, as individuals, is destined for greatness, and if you don’t follow me, this is what is in store for your world one hundred and fifty years from now.”

I took advantage of the holographic conflagration and quit holding hands with Len to shuffle over and have words with Martin. I booped his shoulder until he hunched to hear me out. “If you drug Jax tomorrow to get him on board instead of talking to him like a person,” I whispered in his ear, “I will make this mission a living hell for you. This is what you trained for in Pittsburgh. If you quit talking down to him and listen when he speaks, he will change his mind about this because you respect him, not because you think you know better than he does. Don’t be the selfish old white dude who roofies a black kid to force him into something. Do better.”

“I could’ve chosen any time and any place,” Rip told us. “Of all the people who ever lived, I chose you eight. I certainly hope you won’t let me, or the world, down.”

I wasn’t included in the head count because Rip hadn’t chosen me, which was a good thing. I was something he never saw coming. That meant his future wasn’t a foregone conclusion.

Rip gave Martin the address and walked out. I figured he was going to hide somewhere until we’d all gone, but then the jump ship moved. I felt it land on the street below, hatch open and waiting like an invisible mouth. Rip boarded the ship and it flew off to meet the Waverider in the vacant lot where he wanted to meet us all in thirty-six hours. That was my cue to tell a car with GPS to come get us. I hoped no one would notice there was no driver inside before it got here.

After we arrived at a warehouse he and Mick had repurposed as a safehouse, Len called Lisa and I texted Shawna. I’d rented a U-Haul while Len cased the Bullion Exchange and packed it full of things I thought we might need. Shawna had been practicing teleporting in her car, and she could take it with her seamlessly. I sent her a screencap of the vacant lot so she could have a visual to focus on the next morning. Shawna told me she wanted in because there was probably a cure for Huntingtin’s disease in the future, so even though she couldn’t afford to get tested and find out whether she inherited the genetic marker, she could have a cure in case she ever started having symptoms. I figured having someone with medical training around wasn’t a bad idea, so I agreed.

I didn’t notice how much of a bachelor pad it was in the warehouse until I tried to sit on the couch and my ass encountered an empty takeout box instead. I picked it up and threw it at Mick, but it fell short of actually hitting him.

“I can’t believe you’re thinking of hooking up with the Englishman,” Mick yelled over the sound of the sander he was using to polish the metal. I hadn’t known sandpaper made specifically for usage on metal was a thing. I didn’t ask what he was working on. I knew it was made out of ferrous metal because I felt the iron and nickel in the alloy, but that was it.

“I can’t believe you’re thinking of hooking up with someone who isn’t me,” I deadpanned.

Len chuckled and quit flipping through his magazine to smile at me. I smiled back and booped his thigh with my stocking foot. I liked that wanting to fuck anyone but me was laughable to him. I got insecure sometimes because he was allosexual and I wasn’t. It was good to know he didn’t want anyone else.

Mick switched the sander off. “We’re thieves,” he continued, “crooks, criminals. I have no desire to save the world, especially a hundred years after I’m dead.”

I snorted. “Well,” I yawned again, “then you’re lucky Bea doesn’t want kids.”

Len heaved a sigh. “He said across time, Mick. What about the years before, before fingerprints and surveillance cameras and DNA analysis? Why did we become criminals?”

“Because we hate working and we love money,” Mick retorted.

Len stood in one smooth motion. I could practically feel a winning speech coming on. “We could steal the _Mona Lisa_ straight off Da Vinci’s easel,” he pointed out, “snatch the Hope Diamond before it was discovered. This is everything we got into thieving for in the first place,” he looked over his shoulder at me and murmured, “more than everything.”

Mick turned to face him. “You want me in, I’m in,” he said, “but I’m not gonna be anyone’s hero.”

Len nodded once, a slow descent of his chin, and gently moved my feet before he sat beside me. Mick groaned when Len cupped my face and kissed me, even though he didn’t take it further than his lips on mine. I nipped his bottom lip and his fingertips dug into the skin under my jaw, behind my ear, along my hairline with a lovely sort of pressure. Mick finished his beer and opened another, the bottle cap jangling on the cement floor. I broke the kiss and paramagnetized the bottle cap to hit Mick in the forehead. Bea refused to move in with him because he was a hot mess, literally—his apartment was infinitely worse than the warehouse, so I’d added injury to insult. Mick growled low in his throat and switched the sander back on. Len stole another kiss and it escalated into making out until Mick stopped tinkering with the ferrous metal and decided it was time for sleep.

I ended up lying on top of Len while we slept on the couch, his right hand swallowing my shoulder, his left splayed over the small of my back, my arms slung loosely around his neck and my legs tangled up with his. Mick was snoring loudly from a mattress on the other side of the warehouse, so that was keeping me awake; but Len was cuddling with me, and each sweep of his thumb over the base of my spine, the curve of my shoulder, was keeping me calm.

Here’s the thing: I hadn’t actually seen _Legends of Tomorrow_. I was planning on watching the entire first season over the summer, but then I graduated from college and ended up living on Earth-1 before I did that. I’d also bought the DVD boxed set when I was on Earth-33 without Len, so the episodes weren’t on my laptop anymore. I’d only known Rip was a lying liar who lied about the legendary thing because I’d seen the spoilers on Tumblr. I was a liar too, because I lied to him before we got on board the Waverider.

I explained all of this to Len after Mick was asleep. “That’s why you didn’t tell me anything, hmm? Because you don’t know,” he smoothed his hand up my spine and traced my shoulder blade with his thumb, “you hate not knowing.”

There was smugness in his voice, a smirk that was audible in his tone, but I knew he wasn’t mocking me. I liked that he knew how my mind worked. It helped, not having to explain myself or apologize for being me.

“Don’t tell Rip,” I whispered, “that I lied.”

“I won’t.” Len whispered back conspiratorially. “I promise. I’m actually surprised you pulled it off,” I could hear the grin in his voice even though my head was on his chest and I wasn’t looking at his face, “you’re the worst liar I’ve ever met.”

I yawned and snuggled closer to him, my legs all tangled up with his. “Yeah,” I nuzzled his clavicle, “but I wasn’t technically lying. I do know things could go wrong and I do want to save her.”

“Yeah, about that.” Len smoothed his other hand up and down my spine. “What exactly are we going to do with her once we save her?”

I got a little bit gooey when he said _we_. “I have no idea,” I told him softly, “I don’t know whether my plan to save her is even feasible.”

Len exhaled a quiet gust of air. “I think we should keep her,” he murmured, “you said she’s your half-sister in the darkest timeline. That makes her family.”

“Really?” I propped myself up on my forearm to look at him, “you want to adopt her?”

“Yeah,” Len swept his thumb over the line of my shoulder blade, “we take care of our own. I learned that from you.”

I might’ve ugly cried a little bit. Captain Cold had said the same thing once, in the comics. It was part of the Rogues’ code.6

“Don’t steal the Hope Diamond,” I told him, “steal the Tavernier Blue before it was recut in 1678. Then it would be a hundred and fifteen carats instead of forty-five.”

I’d seen the Hope Diamond up close at the National Museum of Natural History and I’d read a brochure about it. That’s how I knew all about the gemstone, but I digress.

Len smoothed his right hand up from my shoulder to idly stroke my hair, curling his fingers into the frizzy tendrils at the nape of my neck while his palm cradled the back of my head. “I’ll steal _Allegory of Victory_ for you,” he murmured. “That’s your favorite baroque painting at the Louvre, hmm?”7

“Yeah,” I tugged down the collar of his shirt and nuzzled his collarbone, “or _Still Life with a Peeled Lemon_. I miss the Louvre.” 8

“I know,” Len told me softly. “I got tickets to Paris for your birthday. I was hoping you’d be back in time to use them.”

“Oh,” I whispered. I knew he didn’t want to make me feel guilty, which was probably why he hadn’t told me before. There was nothing I could do about the squelchy feeling in my stomach when I thought about leaving him alone, but it wasn’t my fault. That was how the interdimensional cookie had crumbled.

I kissed the hollow of his throat and up the column of his neck to his chin, kissed the corner of his mouth and skimmed my tongue over the seam of his lips. I kissed him thoroughly, but I kept my hands on his head and neck while he smoothed his other hand up from my waist to cup my face. This wasn’t foreplay or a precursor to something else—it was an end in itself.

“I love you,” I told him after I broke the kiss. “I love you so much.”

Len inhaled sharply and pressed our foreheads together. “I love you too,” he said with slow vehemence, “more than anything,” he swallowed thickly and whispered, “more than everything.”

* * *

There was a bathroom at the warehouse, but no shower. Luckily my hair was still wet since I’d braided it after washing it the afternoon before. I washed my sweaty bangs in the sink and took my pills. Then we left and drove to the vacant lot in the poor, unfortunate car I’d stolen. Mick refused to let me return it because all of our DNA was inside. Instead he parked it near a bunch of freight and shot it with his heat gun after we were all a safe distance away, by his questionable standards. It exploded, and I barely had time to generate a dense magnetic field to keep the fragmentation left behind after the explosion from hitting us.

“WHAT THE FUCK?” I yelled at him over the ringing in my ears.

That’s when Ray showed up. Apparently he’d heard the explosion from where Oliver had dropped him and his atomically shrunken luggage off. Nobody had bags with them on the show before they boarded the Waverider, at least not in the promotional footage I’d seen on Earth-33. Where was Sara keeping her White Canary outfit if they brought no literal baggage, just emotional baggage? Discontinuity everywhere.

Anyhow.

“Hi,” Ray waved. “If you don’t mind my asking, why did you blow up that perfectly good car?”

I shrugged one-armed because my other hand was preoccupied with my cane, my ginormous purse flopping against my side in the process. Then I flailed my hand at Mick. “Ask him,” I huffed, “he’s the arsonist.”

“And you’re the technopath who retconned my ex-fiancée’s death,” Ray deduced, “the one who calls herself the goddess of Central City.”

Len put his arm around me, his gloved hand on my shoulder, his thumb idly stroking the exposed skin of my clavicle. “Actually,” he said in his smoothest voice, “my wife is fulgurkinetic.”

I didn’t miss the menacing way he said the words _my wife_ , or Ray glancing down at the engagement ring and wedding band around my finger. I rolled my eyes and made a garbage disposal noise. Ray arched his eyebrows at the garbled sound. It was an ugly noise. I doubted he’d ever heard a girl make such an ugly noise before.

Laurel dropped her sister off about then. Sara approached, walking tall despite being the shortest one on the team except for me.

Sara was five-foot-six. I was five-foot-two. Not a tall person. Len, of course, was six-foot-two. That’s why we almost never used the missionary position: because who wants to rub their face in sweaty chest hair during the throes of passion? No one. That’s who. Len didn’t have a lot of chest hair, at least not compared to some dudes I’d seen without shirts, but still. I had to stand on tiptoe for my head to reach his shoulder. There was a significant height difference going on. It made certain sexual positions a little bit awkward.

Anyhow.

Martin arrived in a silver convertible with Jax conscious in the passenger seat. That’s how I knew he’d taken my advice. I was surprised he hadn’t roofied Jax despite my threat, honestly, but I didn’t question his choice not to.

“I think we’re being punked.” Ray looked skyward and scrunched his mouth awkwardly. “Do people still say punked?”

“No,” Sara told him, like she hadn’t been technically dead longer than he had.

That’s when Shawna teleported into the vacant lot with my U-Haul. Mark was in the passenger seat. Apparently she’d broken her best friend out of prison transport. Mark emerged while I shuffled around to the back and pulled the lever. It didn’t budge. Mick ended up having to open the U-Haul for me because rheumatoid arthritis had ruined my grip strength. I was unloading one of the lighter bags I’d packed when Rip emerged from the Waverider.

“Well,” he said. “I see you’ve all decided to come,” he eyed Shawna and Mark, “and you’ve brought company.”

“Shawna has medical training,” I told him. “None of your recruits do.”

“I have a medical bay on board,” Rip pointed out.

“Yeah,” Len snarked back, “but what if someone gets injured out in the field? Or do you want us to die before we become the legends you think we are?”

Rip gave me a look, probably wondering if I’d told Len that he didn’t think anyone he’d recruited was legendary at all. I had, because Len and I didn’t lie to each other, but he didn’t need to know it. “Fine,” he bit down around the word, “but I don’t need another wild card on this team.”

I scoffed. “Actually,” I said, “a wild card means a reversal of fortune or twist of fate. That’s exactly what you need, or you wouldn’t be here.”

Rip exhaled an exasperated puff of air. “Well then,” he said, “we can be on our way.”

Len had slung his bag over his shoulder and was holding a huge cooler. “I ain’t hoofing it anywhere,” he said.

“Yeah,” Jax tapped his fingers against his thigh and shifted his weight off his bad knee. “That’s also a dealbreaker for me.”

“I second that emotion,” I deadpanned.9

Rip looked fed up with everyone and we weren’t even on the ship yet. “As a Time Master,” he said, “my sacred charge is to do no harm to the timeline. Can you imagine what a time ship would look like in, say, Victorian England?”

“Holographic indigenous camouflage projection,” Martin deduced, his inner nerd showing.

“Indeed.” Rip smiled and uncloaked his ship.

Ray grinned, Sara gawked, Kendra stood and stared in quiet awe, Carter took his sunglasses off, Jax gaped openly, and Martin was smiling like it was something out of H. G. Wells’ stories come to life. Although on _Lois & Clark _the eponymous characters actually met H. G. Wells,10 so this wasn’t any more farfetched than H. G. Wells hanging out with Superman in the late twentieth century.11 Mark tucked his hands in his pockets, Shawna unfolded her arms while her eyes practically bugged out of their sockets, and Mick dropped one of my bags on the ground. Luckily it was a bag of cash, so that was okay. Shawna teleported the empty U-Haul back to Central City, where Anna would take it back to the rental company for me, and returned.

I’d brought a few bulk packages of toilet paper, a plethora of bottled water and cans of Dr. Pepper, a glut of provisions, cash printed in each period we’d be visiting, clothes, a few books, my phone and my laptop. I assumed Rip would have supplies, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

“It’s called the Waverider,” Rip told us. “It’s been my ship for over a decade,” he turned to face the team. “Shall we?”

I nodded and handed him a bag to carry on. I figured he might as well pitch in. Rip took it with a disgruntled noise and I shuffled after him through the open hatch. I picked the room equidistant between the hatch and command central so I wouldn’t have to walk as much. All of the bags I’d brought piled up before everyone went to pick out their own rooms and explore.

Len waited until we were alone in our room before he sat on the bed and looked up at me. I shuffled closer until I was standing between his knees. Len took his gloves off, then reached for my cane and propped it against the edge of the mattress. I put my hands on his shoulders, more for balance than anything else. Len took me into his arms, pulling me down for a kiss so intense my toes curled against the insoles of my orthopedic shoes. I whimpered as his tongue slipped inside my mouth. Len made a low noise in the back of his throat and kissed me harder, until my glasses fogged up and my knees gave out. I ended up half on his lap, straddling his left thigh with one hand on his face while the other was fisted in the front of his shirt. I was lucky I didn’t knee him in the groin. Instead he broke the kiss to gasp, the hitch in between his inhale and exhale a point of pride for me.

I nuzzled his nose with mine and kissed the arch of his eyebrow, the jut of his cheekbone, the clench in his jaw. “Love you,” I told him softly.

Len smiled without baring his teeth, a slow unfurling of his lips. “Love you too,” he said.

I smiled back and used my cane to get back on my feet before I tucked a can of Dr. Pepper into my purse and shuffled toward the mechanized door.

Rip waited for everyone to put their luggage in a room before he used a futuristic intercom to summon us into command central. I noticed there were twelve seats instead of nine, three sets of two on both sides of the table in the middle. That was good, because I’d been worried I’d have to paramagnetize myself to the table itself. I supposed my luck was kicking in again. According to Word of God,12 _Legends of Tomorrow_ was inspired by _The Dirty Dozen_ , and with Shawna and Mark and I we were a dozen.13 How cool was that?

I flopped into a chair as Kendra exclaimed, “I have never seen anything like this before!”

“Neither have I,” said Carter, “and considering I have four thousand years’ worth of memories, that’s saying something.”

I liked how starry-eyed she was, even though she wanted to run and hide. I didn’t like how Carter pointed out that he remembered their past lives and she didn’t.

Here’s the thing: I also didn’t like that Kendra was Hawkgirl while Carter was Hawkman. There was this weird implication of infantilizing that came with her being a girl while he was a man. It wouldn’t have bothered me too much, except their relationship dynamic was unbalanced. Carter remembered everything, while Kendra didn’t. Carter knew how to fly, how to fight, but Kendra didn’t. Carter had to teach Kendra about herself and told her that he knew her better than she knew herself, because she didn’t know herself. Hell, she didn’t know anything at this point. That’s what irked me. Anyhow.

“How does a vessel of this size function without a crew?” Martin wondered.

“Oh,” said Rip, “I don’t need one. I have Gideon.”

Gideon materialized between the surface of the table and a holographic imager above it. “Welcome aboard,” xe said, “I am Gideon, an interactive artificial consciousness programmed to operate this vessel’s critical systems and aid Captain Hunter in his mission.”

Len tilted his head, his brow furrowing. “Captain?” he said in his calmest tone, the voice that meant he might lose his cool.

I had to force myself not to laugh at how attached he was to the codename Cisco had given him. It was adorable, but I’d never say that out loud.

Rip ignored him. “Gideon’s been working on helping me locate Vandal Savage,” he explained.

“I thought you said he’s pretty active in the twenty-second century,” Ray pointed out.

“Perhaps engaging Savage at the height of his powers isn’t the best strategy,” Martin deduced.

“Indeed,” said Rip, “unfortunately Savage has kept his movements hidden throughout history. Not even Gideon could determine where or when we can find him, but I have the next best thing: the man who can.”

At that, he pulled up the file on Aldus Boardman and set our course for the day he’d died. This was another shady move on his part, a way to manipulate Kendra and Carter specifically to empathize with him, because a dead son would be something they had in common in the aftermath. Rip assumed his death was going to happen that day regardless of our intervention because of what he knew about the pre-deterministic nature of time itself. Ugh.

I was in the process of folding my futuristic seatbelt over my breasts—which squished awkwardly under the metal, because they were huge and unwieldy—when Rip took his seat in the captain’s chair. It went like this, all told: Rip in the captain’s chair, clockwise to Martin and Jax, then Carter and Kendra, then Ray and Sara, then me in the singular seat across the table from the captain’s chair, then Len and Mick, and finally Mark and Shawna. “Now I suggest you all strap yourselves in,” he said, “temporal navigation isn’t something one wants to be standing up for.”

Len offered me his hand, probably remembering how much I hated takeoff from our trip to Seattle. I took it and he swept his thumb over my knuckles, mapping the distance between the first knuckle of my thumb to the middle of my forefinger. I felt the rough callous on his thumb against the back of my hand and blushed.

“Now,” Rip kept talking, “some of you may experience some slight discomfort. In very rare instances there will be some, er, bleeding from the eyeballs.”

“I’m sorry, what?” Kendra squawked, her voice pitching higher in distress as she leaned forward in her seat.

“Well,” Rip gesticulated in tiny spinning motions as the Waverider rose in midair, “the human body is used to time unfolding linearly,” he turned his chair around to face the windshield, “all your worlds are about to change.”

That’s when he pulled the lever and we took off into hypertime. Chronos arrived to find that our trail had gone cold a few seconds later.14

* * *

St. Roch on Earth-33 was a neighborhood in the Eighth Ward of New Orleans with two major historical landmarks: a market, and a chapel located in a huge cemetery. St. Roch in the comics was a much larger city and home to various incarnations of Hawkman and Hawkgirl. It was called the city the saints had forgotten, or the city without heroes.15

None of that was what I was thinking about when we landed there. I was trying not to vomit, and hearing Mick throwing up all over the floor next to his seat didn’t help.

“Oh, I should’ve mentioned it before.” Rip sighed and unstrapped himself as he spoke. “Nausea is one of the side effects of time travel along with…” Ray, as if on cue, flopped onto the floor like a broken doll. “…vertigo…”

Martin took his glasses off, blinking. “I can’t see,” he said.

“…and temporary blindness.” Rip walked over to wave one hand in front of his face. “Oh, it should only last a minute. After all, that was a mere jaunt,” he explained, “the further back in time you go, the worse the side effects.”

Len shook it off, inhaling sharply and closing his eyes. I stood up, slowly, and shuffled over to give a tiny bottle of mouthwash to Mick, who took it and spat on the floor of the ship after he gargled.

“Thanks,” he told me.

“Yeah,” I deadpanned, “you’re welcome, but you’re also disgusting.”

Mick shrugged and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I can live with that,” he said.

“Now,” Rip gestured to everyone with questionable morals, “you six, feel free to make yourselves comfortable back on the ship, while the rest of you are coming with me to find Professor Boardman.”

“Whoa,” Mick said, and kept saying it until Rip turned back to face us with another exasperated huff, “you’re benching us?”

Sara actually sounded upset when she said, “I thought we were a _team_.”

“Well,” Rip gesticulated again, waving his right arm to punctuate his words, “this mission doesn’t require your particular skill set. Yet.”

Len pulled me onto his lap—ostensibly to keep me from going anywhere without him because we had very different sets of skills—before he said, “you mean you don’t need anyone killed, maimed, or robbed.”

Rip nodded. “Precisely.”

“Um,” Ray tugged on his sleeve and mumbled, “are you sure it’s a good idea to leave them all unsupervised on a time machine?”

“Hey, haircut.” Mick snarled. “Deafness wasn’t one of the side effects.”

“Oh!” I giggled. I couldn’t help it! Ray totally had a classic hero haircut. Superman, eat your heart out. Len smirked and dug his fingers into my thigh hard enough to make me squirm a little bit. “Inappropriate,” I told him softly.

Len smirked wider. “Always,” he murmured.

“We better hurry up,” Rip walked briskly toward the exit, “Professor Boardman will die in less than twenty-four hours.”

“Then what’s the point in cutting it so close?” Ray wondered.

“Because if he’s destined to die, then he doesn’t have a timeline for us to disrupt, and his impact on the future will be minimal.” Martin postulated. “How brilliant!”

“And depressing.” Kendra shook her head so her hair oscillated around her shoulders. If only she knew. “How does he die?”

Rip made another exasperated noise. No one was moving fast enough for his purposes. “I found dead at his university from unknown causes,” he explained as quickly as possible, “come on.”

Jax stayed on the ship because he wanted to get a closer look at the tech aboard. Which made sense, because he was a mechanic. This was his jam.

“Shawna.” I flailed until Len took his hands off me and used my cane to get back on my feet again. “Gideon can do genome mapping in the med bay, if you want to get tested for Huntingtin’s while we wait.”

Apparently genome sequencing was standard procedure to optimize medical treatment in the future, because that’s how they’d cured most genetic diseases: with pre-emptive strikes that isolated the genetic cause of those diseases and eliminated those markers. There was no cure for rheumatoid arthritis in the future, because nobody got RA anymore.

That’s what Shawna and Mark got busy doing as Jax talked to Gideon and tuned into cable television. Mick grumbled something about reruns. I opened my mouth to start babbling about why that was: because we could only see what was currently broadcasting.

Jax held up his hand to stop me. “Don’t even bother trying to explain,” he said.

“Hey,” Sara stopped pacing and spun gracefully to face us, “am I the only one on this ship who could really use a drink?” she asked.

I kept looking at the flash of bare flesh between her shirt and jeans. I’d read an interview with the actor who played Len on Earth-1 in which he said his character had a crush on Sara in show canon, so even though I loved her, being around her made me nervous. Hell, being around conventionally attractive blonde girls made me anxious no matter what. It gave me flashbacks to the girls in junior high and high school who used to pinch me in the halls to show me where I supposedly needed to lose weight. None of that was on Sara, though, so I tried not to hold it against her. That didn’t change how insecure I suddenly felt.

“I say we go get weird in the seventies,” Sara suggested.

Len turned and smiled at her before he said, “excellent idea.”

Sara lit up when she smiled. Which hurt my heart a little bit in a way that had nothing to do with jealousy, because I loved Sara. I cried when she died. There was that cognitive dissonance again. “I’ve got the perfect outfit,” she said.

Rip had landed in Couturie Forest—part of New Orleans City Park—and we walked up Harrison Avenue once we were out of the woods. I took a selfie with the street sign to show Harry before we walked down Magnolia Road, until we found a parking lot. Mick hotwired a car while I called shotgun. Len ended up driving while Mick and Sara occupied the backseat.

I kicked my shoes off and put my feet up on the dashboard, wiggling my toes and showcasing the glittery black polish on my toenails. Ironically, its name was Blitz; another thing Rip didn’t need to know about me. I popped the joints in my ankles, pointed my toes as far as I could.

Len parked in front of the Avenue Pub, six and a half miles from the forest where the ship was. Mick ordered drinks while I ordered pub fries. Len had one arm slung over my shoulders again, his parka an odd contrast to my black velvet dress with the hanky hem. I was a walking proto-goth anachronism, because the gothic subculture grew out of the post-punk bands that started to form in 1977, but I figured no one would notice how outlandish my dress was since it was a bar in the seventies and people were probably smoking pot or doing psychedelic drugs. I also had no makeup on, because one couldn’t apply makeup when one didn’t have two working hands, so only my outfit was goth.

“Ah, dollar beers.” Mick grinned when he returned with drinks. “You gotta love the seventies. Who wants to listen to some Captain & Tennille?” he asked as he distributed bottles to Sara and then Len. “My mother played them,” he took a drink as he eyed the jukebox, “a lot.”

“That’s not why you set her on fire, is it?” I asked.

“No,” Mick stretched the _oh_ sound out petulantly as he pressed a button on the jukebox and “Love Will Keep Us Together” started to play. 16

“You wanna dance?” Sara asked.

It took me an embarrassingly long few seconds to realize she had asked me, not Len. “Oh,” I said as she offered me her hand. “Yes,” I reached out for her with my bad hand. “Yes, I do.”

Len grinned and leaned down to whisper into my ear. “You go ahead,” he told me. “I’ll watch.”

I was blushing hot enough to attract a heat-seeking missile when he took his arm off my shoulders and she pulled me onto the dancefloor. Len ended up holding her beer in his other hand and my cane in the crook of his elbow. Unfortunately we only got to dance for a little bit. Then a meathead with a grenade tattooed on his bicep decided to hit on Sara.

I backed away because I knew there was a barfight in the near future and reacquired my cane while Sara fought seven men at once before she asked for help. Len threw the bottles on the floor and he was smiling when he started throwing punches.

I’ll admit it was kind of hot watching Len fight. I tugged my bottom lip between my teeth as Mick dragged a man across the bar and he went flying into the opposite wall. “I love the seventies!” he shouted.

That’s when Len threw someone into the jukebox and I decided we were done here.

“Okay!” I generated simultaneous electromagnetic pulses that knocked everyone out except those of us from the future. I dropped everyone in this bar like flies and mourned the loss of my fries.

Sara was still punching one dude in the face, but it was the one who propositioned her to join him in the parking lot, so that didn’t bother me. I shuffled into the kitchen and stole a basket of fries. Mick found me and decided to assemble a takeout bag of three cheeseburgers for himself.

“Sara,” I called into the quiet bar, “do you want a burger?”

“Yeah,” Sara yelled back, “and fries!”

I gave my takeout bags to Mick because I didn’t have enough hands to carry food for three people and shuffled out. I told the cash register to open and stuffed a wad of cash inside the drawer to cover the damages before I closed it again. Then we drove back to Couturie Forest, just in time to hit Chronos with the stolen car.

Shawna had teleported everyone back inside the ship one at a time—at this point she could teleport in a car but not with more than one person—so the battle was in full swing: Rip was shooting blue laser blasts, Carter and Kendra were providing aerial support, Firestorm had flamed on, Ray was doing his thing as the Atom, and Mark was extracting lightning from a localized thundercloud to aim strikes at Chronos.

Len shifted gears and drew his gun as he got out of the car. “We go out for one lousy drink,” he shouted in the aftermath of a grenade exploding, “and you guys somehow manage to pick a fight with Boba Fett?”

Mick fired the heat gun at Chronos after he got back on his feet, covering me. I could feel the metal in the armor Chronos had on. It was high-tech as fuck, but still ferromagnetic. I grinned and booped his interface with my brain. “I’ve got this,” I said, “he’s made of metal. That means he’s mine.”

Chronos still managed to hit Aldus with a fatal shot before I used my powers to throw him as far as I could and scattered his armor in every direction before I dropped him in the Mississippi River. Carter and Kendra carried their son on board the ship while Gideon prepared the med bay for him. Rip flew off into hypertime after we all strapped ourselves in again, not wasting any time hanging around where Chronos knew we could be; he grabbed a bag from his desk and explained the temporal zone while he went to work on repairing the cloaking system and the AFT entrance.

“Astonishing,” Martin exclaimed in a voice that shook.

“Oh, there’s something you people don’t know about time travel? That surprises me, considering none of you have ever time traveled before!” Rip made another exasperated noise, this one much louder than the others that had come before. “Bringing a family member from the past onto a time ship! Breaking out and carousing around the nineteen-seventies,” he started assessing the damage to the cloaking system, “we’ve barely even begun and already this is the worst unmitigated disaster of my career—”

That’s when Kendra punched him in the face. “My son is hurt because of you,” she yelled at Rip as she slammed him up against the wall, “who attacked us?”

“Chronos,” I said, “but I’m not sure if it’s David Clinton or Walker Gabriel. I’m assuming the former, but I could be wrong.”

“Okay,” Kendra shook Rip a little bit, “who the hell is Chronos and why did he attack us?”

“That’s a bit of a long story,” Rip mumbled.

“Better tell it fast, Rip.” Len stood and moved closer to where I sat in the singular chair, smoothing his hand up my thigh and pressing his palm against the velvet material of my dress. “‘Cause it looks like the lady isn’t in a patient mood.”

“Neither am I,” Carter said in a soft, deadly voice.

“Chronos works for the council of Time Masters,” Rip explained as Kendra released her hold on him, “my former employers.”

That got Sara out of her seat and stalking toward him like a predator. “I thought you were a Time Master,” she said, hurling the words at him accusatorially.

“As I’ve said,” Rip talked with his hands as he walked to meet her in the middle, “time is not a linear thing. At some point I was, in fact, a Time Master—”

That’s when she punched him in the face, knocking him back a few steps. I wanted to start a slow clap, but I didn’t because it would’ve hurt my bad hand. Shawna did it instead. Mark and Mick clapped along with her while I gave her a thumbs up.

“Will you people please stop hitting me?” Rip yawped, his pitching higher in pain as he covered his sore jaw with his palm.

“Start telling the truth!” Sara yelled over the slow clapping.

Rip threw up his hands in surrender. “I relinquished my position as a Time Master when I commandeered the Waverider,” he explained, “Chronos was clearly sent to bring me in.”

I had to pee at the most inopportune moment, so I shuffled out of command central while Rip explained why he’d chosen his recruits. I was still peeing when Rip told them that they couldn’t kill him because Gideon wouldn’t listen to their commands, so I couldn’t retort that xe would listen to a fulgurkinetic metahuman like me. I washed my hands and fetched my takeout bag from the room before I returned.

“I don’t imagine you’re the kind of guy who quits his job and takes on this kind of threat for altruistic reasons,” said Ray, “so, Rip, why don’t you tell us? What did Vandal Savage do to you?”

Rip exhaled, his exasperation giving way to the exhaustion he’d been ignoring while he plotted his revenge. “Time Masters discourage marriage,” he explained, “they urge against procreation even more. Time Masters should be free of any personal entanglements that might…compromise…them, but I fell in love and we had a child, a boy. Jonas.”

I wanted to ask whether or not Bonnie Baxter was canonically his wife, because she’d been his girlfriend in the comics, but I figured this wasn’t the time.17 Gideon told me later that his wife was actually Miranda Shrieve, a character who only existed in the _Flashpoint_ continuity in the comics. Apparently she’d changed her surname to Coburn when she became a Time Master, then to Hunter after she married Rip. 18

Anyhow.

I ate my fries instead of speaking up. I was hypoglycemic, okay? Don’t judge me.

“Savage killed your family.” Ray said it out loud and it hung there in thin air until it became palpable.

“Yes,” Rip hissed, “he _slaughtered_ my family, and thousands of other families, and the body that I swore an oath to serve turned a blind eye. They continued to turn a blind eye. I want…” he swallowed thickly, “the last thing that my child saw in this world was that monster’s face. You can be damn well sure that when Savage dies the last face he sees will be mine. I understand if, under the circumstances, you wish to return home. We can make the jump once the repairs are done, if and when Professor Boardman stabilizes.”

That’s when Carter and Kendra left to go be with their son. I looked down at the floor because I knew his doomed fate would be all over my face.

Martin looked around the room at everyone, including me, and sighed as the weight of everything settled over him. “I think we all need a little time to consider our options,” he said.

That’s how Sara, Ray, Mark, Shawna, Mick, Len, and I ended up sitting around a cargo hold of sorts waiting for someone to start talking while Ray tinkered with his exosuit. Sara was sitting in one corner, distancing herself from everyone. Ray had the exosuit on a box and his tools on another. Mark occupied another corner diagonal from where Sara was, spinning the inner band of a ring he wore on his left hand. Julie had given the ring to him because it hadn’t been legal for them to get married when they’d been together before the particle accelerator exploded, but more on that later. Shawna was perched on the box next to him with her legs crossed and fingers tapping where her ankles were obscured by her jeans. Mick was in the corner perpendicular to Sara, cleaning his heat gun.

I scooted one of the boxes over so I’d have a place to put my feet. Len stole my idea and folded himself into the space beside me, wrapping his left arm around my shoulder again. I smiled at him and put my arm loosely around his waist, hooking my thumb into one of the belt loops on his dark jeans. Len quit playing with his gun and cupped my face to steal a quick kiss. I melted into it before he pulled back too soon.

“So you have a kid,” Len said to Mark. “I thought you were asexual.”

“I am,” Mark retorted. “I had Josh through asexual reproduction.”

I giggled. I couldn’t help it! Ray got it a fraction of a second after I did, laughing in spite of how crappy he felt. Mick guffawed, a harsh loud sound that ricocheted in the cargo hold.

“But your girlfriend was the one who got pregnant,” Len pointed out, “how exactly does that work?”

I wondered who else would’ve been pregnant if not Julie. Then it occurred to me that he was implying Mark could get pregnant. Which didn’t make any sense unless Mark was transgender, because if that were true he’d be a dude who could get pregnant.

“Oh,” I blurted once I’d deduced that. I didn’t say anything else, though.

Mark couldn’t have gotten Julie pregnant, but Josh had atmokinetic superpowers. Which meant Clyde must’ve been their sperm donor. Which in turn meant that Julie and Mark had ostensibly been trying to have kids when the particle accelerator exploded.

I figured it was only a matter of time before anybody else got where my brain had taken me. I didn’t want to out Mark as trans in front of everybody when we were on a time ship with nowhere to run or hide, so I outed myself instead.

“I’m demisexual,” I said, “so we’re both on the asexual spectrum.”

“Hey,” Ray quit tinkering with his exosuit for a second to grin crookedly, “me too.”

“What’s demisexual?” Sara asked.

Here’s the thing: Sara had spent the past several years out of the loop—between assassinating people as a member of the League of Assassins, doing vigilante justice as part of Team Arrow, or being literally dead, she never learned the word _demisexual_. Hell, the only queer person she spent time with that she actually liked was Nyssa. I didn’t know how long exactly the term _demisexual_ had been a thing, but I hadn’t known the word for what my sexuality was until I was twenty-two. It didn’t shock me that she didn’t know.

“It’s when a person is only sexually attracted to people they’re emotionally invested in,” I told her.

I could practically see how the word clicked for Sara: her lips gaped open a little bit, her eyes widened, and a smile unfurled after she thought it through. I knew how good it felt, to feel a piece of yourself falling into place, to hear a word and know it was yours.

Sara had shrugged off whatever had been weighing her down, and when she smiled at me it was so pretty it hurt to look at her a little bit. “I think I might be, too.”

“Awesome,” I smiled back without showcasing my slightly crooked teeth, “we can be the asexual spectrum squadron.”

“Or ace squad,” Mark said, “for short.”

That’s when the exosuit threw off a blast of plasma discharge that hit the box in front of Mick. Ray held up his hand in mock surrender, his eyes bugging out as Mick glared at the scorch mark on the floor of the cargo hold.

“Watch it!” Mick snarled.

“Sorry.” Ray lowered his hand. “Sorry,” he echoed and heaved a sigh. “What’s the point of us even giving this a second thought? Rip has already seen the future, he knows exactly what’s in store for each of us,” he made a rueful noise, “the world doesn’t need any of us. You’re just a lost assassin,” he turned to Sara and then side-eyed the criminal element in the other corners. “You’re just a bunch of good for nothing criminals.”

“I can live with that,” Mick retorted.

Len didn’t say anything, but he squished me closer to him until our thighs were pressed together. I unhooked my thumb from his belt loop and curled my fingers over where his waist met his hip.

“Well, I can’t.” Ray twisted his fingers together, giving himself something to do with his hands now that he wasn’t tinkering. “I can’t live with someone putting a cap on my destiny. I spent my whole life working to be something greater by becoming something smaller, and some guy comes along and tells me that being the Atom is as insignificant as an actual atom.”

“That’s not what he said.” Sara rose gracefully and stood. “Rip said that in his future we’re nobodies, but this mission is about changing the future. If we have the power to change the world, don’t you think we have the power to change our own fate?”

Len dragged his fingers up and down my arm until I shivered and he was smirking when he said, “for better or for worse.”

“Oh!” I flailed and caught my cane before it fell to the floor. “Rip didn’t know Len and I were married,” I spun the handle between my fingers as I talked, “which proves my theory of a primary timeline versus a singular timeline. Rip’s future—what I call the darkest timeline—is always going to exist, because otherwise he wouldn’t have come back to avenge his family, but that doesn’t mean it’s our future. Hell, the timeline we were living in was a divergent timeline because of a psychotic speedster who changed everything about the past by killing one woman. Time Masters didn’t stop him from doing that, so they aren’t all-knowing and they don’t control everything. We can be what the future never saw coming. We can be legendary.”

Ray smiled up at Sara before he turned to me. “Those are very good points,” he said, “and I’d like to hear more about your theory.”

“First we need to decide whether or not we’re in or out,” Len said in the smooth voice he used to make winning speeches.

“I got what I came for,” Shawna told us, “but I was the one who brought Mac to S. T. A. R. Labs the night she almost died.”

I hadn’t known that. “Wait,” I blurted. “What?”

“Yeah,” Shawna nodded, “the Flash called me because he was afraid that running with you would kill you faster. I took you to S. T. A. R. Labs. I reset your bones and then I watched you die for three minutes. That’s when the other Harrison Wells—and I’m still freaked out by the whole doppelganger thing, just so you know—injected you with the serum or whatever. Savage did kill you,” her mouth scrunched into an angry line, “so I’m in.”

At this point, Shawna and I were friends. I’d never hung out with her without other people there, but there had been girls’ nights and movie marathons and drinks at which I was always the designated driver. I paid off her student loans before I returned to Earth-33 without Len. Shawna had lost her parents—her mom when she was young, her dad when she was in college—so even though she was the one Lisa bitched at about me leaving while I was gone, she got that I had to see my family no matter what. Then we became friends after I returned to Earth-1, and that was that. Shawna was a ride or die sort of person when it came to the people who mattered to her. Apparently watching me die made her want Savage dead.

Warmth unfurled inside my chest. “If I were a hugging person,” I said, “I’d totally give you a hug.”

“Let’s not and say we did,” Shawna quipped.

I nudged Len, a nonverbal _stop thinking about what might’ve happened if I’d stayed dead_. I knew he was thinking about it because his grip on my shoulder was almost painful. Len unclenched his fingers and I felt the tension all through his body. It was okay, though. I figured that I could help him work it out later when we were alone.

“I’m in,” Mark told us gruffly. Rip wanted his family back. Mark wanted the same thing: he wanted to save Clyde. That’s why Shawna had brought her best friend on board: to give him a shot at getting his brother back.

Later, once the repairs were finished, we all told Rip that we were in.

That’s how we became a team.

* * *

**Scene II**  
The Universal Round 

* * *

Rip took off after we all said we were in and we landed in Norway two days later. Of course the trip had only taken seconds, but we hadn’t lost any time anyway. Hell, most of the people on the ship weren’t even alive in the seventies.

Mick, who would’ve been seven in 1975, doubled over in a vain attempt to quell his nausea.

“What are you complaining about?” Len asked. “It’s not like we time jumped.”

“I hate flying,” Mick retorted, “especially in whatever this thing is.”

Mick had thrown up both ways on our trip from Central City to Seattle: once at Sea-Tac airport, then again on the tarmac at Lambert. This didn’t come as a shock, pun unintended. Hell, I was surprised I hadn’t vomited yet. I unstrapped myself and exhaled a soft whoosh of air instead.

“Where exactly are we?” Carter asked.

Kendra glanced at one of the many screens in command central. “We’re still in 1975, right?”

“Indeed,” Rip unstrapped himself and stood up all at once. “October nineteenth, 1975, on the fjords of Northern Norway.”

Len smiled at me, probably remembering my geeky rant about the history of my hometown, which was founded by a man from Førde Fjord. Førde Fjord was located in Western Norway, while we’d landed in either Finnmark, Troms, or Nordland, the three northernmost counties which made up Northern Norway. I was guessing we were somewhere near the Lyngen Alps, but I wasn’t sure. Len stood to look at the images on the screen built into the tabletop, which confirmed that we were a few miles outside Tromsø. “Sounds like a vacation,” he said.

Rip made another exasperated noise as he went back into the captain’s quarters to fetch a leatherbound notebook. “Which we can take as soon as the threat of Savage has been neutralized, Mr. Snart.”

Len side-eyed me, a nonverbal _what an asshole_. I bit my bottom lip to stifle a giggle and gave him a tiny nod, a nonverbal _why do you think he keeps getting sucker punched in the face?_

“That’s Aldus’s notebook,” said Carter.

Rip nodded as he flipped through the notebook. “Yes, he theorized that Savage might be here,” he explained, “and if he’s right, and we can capture Savage, then at least Professor Boardman didn’t die in vain.”

I rolled my eyes, because Aldus was going to die either way.

“Can’t we just go back and save Aldus?” Kendra wondered, hope filling her voice like helium inflating a balloon.

“He was our son,” said Carter.

“Look,” Rip huffed through the obvious parallel between his own son dying and everything that had happened to Aldus because of him. “I’m sorry, but we can’t go back and change events in which we participated. Time would fold in on itself, creating a temporal vortex.”

“Which sounds way cooler than it is,” Ray quipped.

“There is a loophole,” I pointed out, “using foreknowledge gleaned from being a comic book geek from a parallel universe, which is how I saved Anna.”

Mark was watching me when I postulated that, spinning the inner band of his ring while he made a plan. I yawned, oblivious to the cogs whirling in his head. I only noticed he was staring when I looked at Shawna, who looked away; in hindsight, her loyalty belonged to her best friend. I couldn’t blame her.

“Forgetting physics and chaos theory for a second,” Sara interjected, “shouldn’t we figure out what Savage is doing in Norway?”

“According to Gideon,” Rip strode over to stand by the table, “there is a large meeting of terrorists and fringe groups looking to buy illegal arms.”

Mick grinned, but stayed in his seat because he was still nauseous. “Now that sounds like a vacation,” he said.

I rolled my eyes and used my cane to get back on my feet so I was standing across the table from Rip.

“Well,” Len quit leaning on the edge of the table and smoothed his hand along my spine, “arms dealers and terrorists aren’t exactly our kind of people,” his thumb swirled over the knob of bone at the nape of my neck and my thighs clenched under my skirt, “but they’re the next best thing.”

“Looks like you and your lapdogs get to earn your keep,” said Carter.

“Rude,” I huffed.

“I didn’t mean you.” Carter inclined his head toward where Mick and Mark sat. “I meant them.”

Mark exhaled a derisive noise and muttered something that might’ve been, “As if.”

Mick ground his teeth, but he still didn’t leave his seat. “I’m no one’s lapdog, birdman.”

“So,” Kendra kept her arms folded as she eyed Rip like a bird of prey eyed its next meal. “What exactly does one wear to a black market arms bazaar, anyway?”

“Oh, the Waverider has a fabrication room,” Rip told us, “which can fashion temporally indigenous, er, fashion.”

I grinned at that revelation. I loved clothes, especially vintage ones. I’d spent most of my life thinking I couldn’t pull off clothes I liked, but eventually I decided to wear whatever I wanted and ignore anybody who said I couldn’t. It was liberating, and a successful experiment, because most people thought I was adorable. I used to hate being called adorable—or cute, for that matter—but those designations had grown on me. I blamed Len, because he kept calling me cute and then giving me mindblowing orgasms. It was hard to hate anything in the afterglow, okay? Don’t judge me.

“You have a room that makes clothing?” Jax asked, incredulous but excited by the possibility.

“Doesn’t everyone?” Rip inquired over his shoulder, his futurism showing.

“Nope,” I deadpanned. “Not a thing in the twenty-first century. Which I’m very bitter about, let me tell you what.”

* * *

Len matched his pace to mine after we left command central. I’d asked Gideon where the fabrication room was, so I led the way. Rip didn’t notice we’d gone until he turned back around to find us conspicuously absent.

“Alright,” Ray fell in step beside us, “first thing we need to do is work up a plan.”

“Got a lot of experience infiltrating criminal gatherings?” Len turned a corner without giving Ray a chance to answer his question. “Didn’t think so. I’m calling the shots.”

“Actually,” Rip caught up to us, “I’m in charge, in case any of you have forgotten.”

“No, I remember.” Len snarked back. “I just don’t care.”

Rip spun on his heels, only to see Mick behind him. “Do I need to remind any of you that I’m a Time Master?” he raised his voice indignantly, “making discreet alterations to the timeline is what I do. So we’re not just going to charge into the past like a bull into a china shop—”

Mick cut him off. “Why should we listen to you after what you told us about the mission turned out to be lies?”

“None of you have ever encountered Vandal Savage before,” Rip countered. “I have!”

“Yeah,” I raised the hand I wasn’t using to hold my cane awkwardly, “so have I. Actually, he almost got me killed. I only survived because of mad science.”

Rip went quiet for a second or three because I’d given him a piece of brand new information. It didn’t last. “Then you of all people know you are making a big mistake!” he yawped.

Ray scoffed. “Already did that when we trusted you,” he said.

Sara had found the fabrication room first, judging by the coveralls and headscarf she was decked out in once we arrived. “It’s all yours,” she told me, “ladies first.”

Len followed me into the room and closed the door behind us. I flipped through a holographic screen of seventies fashion to pick something out while he shucked his parka and made a selection for himself. I was in the process of fastening a wide blue belt around my waist when he flipped my skirt a little. I squawked and spun to face him. Len held up his hands in mock surrender and gave me that filthy smirk. “I’m not going to be able to concentrate if you’re wearing that,” he told me.

I had on a black sweater vest over a pale blue shirt, a pleated blue plaid skirt, and knee socks that matched the shirt. I’d also picked out a black leather bomber jacket, because I knew the whole schoolgirl look wouldn’t fly at the arms bazaar. “I’m putting a jacket on over it,” I pointed out.

“Yeah.” Len folded his arms to stop himself from touching me when we didn’t have the time to finish what he wanted to start. “Not helping.”

I handed him my cane and he held it for me while I shrugged the jacket on. “What are you really worried about?” I wondered. “Tell me.”

Len grit his teeth and exhaled in a futile effort unclench his jaw. “What if I can’t protect you?” he asked in the most vulnerable tone I’d ever heard come out of his mouth.

“I can protect myself,” I told him softly, “and I’m going on this mission with you no matter what. It’s in our wedding vows. Where you go, I go.”

Len unfolded his arms to cup my face in both hands and he kissed me meticulously, not to keep me quiet, but to show me that he liked what I’d said. “I’m still calling the shots,” he said after he broke the kiss.

I rolled my eyes at him. “There’s only one kind of situation in which I take orders from you,” I retorted, “and this is not it.”

Len made a frustrated noise low in his throat and stole another kiss, slanting his mouth over mine hard and with a hint of teeth before he buttoned his overcoat and we left the fabrication room. I knew my mouth was probably swollen red after that, but I didn’t care. There were elbow patches on his overcoat. That’s where my priorities were.

Carter and Kendra flew Jax onto the roof of the building where the arms bazaar was happening while Mick ended up having to hotwire two cars for everyone else. Mark and Mick ended up on either side of Len; Sara and Shawna ended up on either side of me. Martin had no muscle to back him up, but with Jax on the roof he didn’t need any.

Sara heaved a sigh as we approached the building. “They’re checking credentials,” she told us, “and we don’t have any.”

“Not yet,” Shawna drew the _eh_ sound out and bit down on the consonant after it, “but we will.”

“We got this,” Mick told Sara. “Trust us.”

I trusted them more than I trusted anybody else on this motley crew of a team, honestly. I loved everyone in this bar, but Mick was family. I had no idea how that happened, but it was true.

That’s when Len snatched an invitation from an Arab man. “Excuse you,” he said in his calmest, deadliest voice before he walked up like he owned the place and handed the orange card to the dude guarding the door. I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep myself from laughing at him when he said he was Arab on his mother’s side, taking his inspiration from Louise.

“Is there a problem?” Martin actually raised his voice. That was enough to almost make me bleed my own blood. “I don’t like delays,” he told the dude guarding the door, “do you know who we are?” Then he claimed responsibility for a multitude of terrorist attacks, or events that could’ve been terrorist attacks, that had occurred since 1963. “Bottom line,” he said, “you don’t want to doubt me.”

Mick was grinning when he slung an arm around Martin. “You’re a special kind of crazy,” he said. “I like it.”

I could feel the metal and power in the room, but I got a little bit distracted watching Len move. All that precision in the smooth way he walked did it for me, and I would’ve been embarrassed by that if I didn’t know he felt the equal and opposite way about me and my perpetual awkwardness.

“We’re in,” Len told our reinforcements on the roof.

“Why don’t I get to play terrorist?” Jax asked.

“Why would you want to?” I wondered.

“This is just a kidnapping,” Len told him, “no need for your nuclear fireworks.”

“Technically it’s an abduction,” I said, “because our target isn’t a kid.”

Len cocked his head in concession. “Savage will be one of the buyers,” he murmured, “once we get eyes on him, hang back. We’ll boost him once this is all over.”

That’s when I saw Damien Darhk, whom I barely recognized because he looked so much younger than he was in season four of _Arrow_ —in the seventies he looked like he was in his early twenties, if that. Not unlike his counterpart from the comics, who’d had a serious case of babyface. What had happened to make him look so much older in the future than he looked now, since he didn’t age?

“Any sign of him?” Carter asked.

“Nope,” I said.

Mark had fanned out into another part of the building with Shawna. “Not here,” he said gruffly.

Len heaved a sigh. “Let’s get Ginger and the professor,” he muttered, “and move out.”19

I giggled. I couldn’t help it! I could totally see Martin building a nuclear reactor out of coconuts. Len snaked his left arm around my waist as the auction began, intending to keep me close when we made our getaway.

That’s when Savage emerged from the crowd and stepped onstage.

“Seems we were wrong about Savage,” Martin said quietly. “He’s not one of the buyers.”

“He’s the seller,” Sara said flatly.

Apparently the bidding was done by shooting at the ceiling. Impractical, but melodramatic. Damien fired his gun and eyed us suspiciously, his gaze lingering over me. That freaked me out. Damien ate what Saf called _qi_ for every meal, and I was full of electricity—if he sensed it, he might make a meal out of me.

Savage was looking our way, too. “It appears we’ve drawn some unwanted attention,” Martin said. “We need to bid. Fire your gun in the air.”

Len didn’t have a garden variety gun, but Mick did: he fired at the ceiling and I flinched at the noise.

“Um,” Sara elongated the _mm_ sound into the same freaked out territory I was occupying, “what’s happening?”

“It’s what’s not happening that is the concern,” Martin retorted.

“Oh,” I whispered. “Oh no.”

“Nobody else is bidding,” Len murmured.

“Congratulations, professor,” said Mick, “you just bought yourself a nuclear weapon.”

After we outbid the arms dealers and terrorists, Damien came to make vaguely menacing small talk. Mick snarled at him to back off when he tried to get a closer look at me. Savage intervened, and Martin gave himself away as a time traveler a few seconds later.

“Change of plans,” Savage ascended until he was onstage again. “I will provide a twenty-five percent discount to the organization which brings me the heads of these men!”

“Can I burn some stuff now?” Mick grumbled.

“I wish you would,” Len muttered.

That was all the permission he needed to draw the heat gun. I untangled myself from Len as he drew his weapon and concentrated on the bullets flying, trusting my husband to take out anybody within killing distance while I kept us from getting shot to death.

I felt it when Savage activated the warhead, but I couldn’t keep so many dense magnetic fields going and disarm it all at once. While everyone was running around and moving, I sat on the steps by the stage and kept track of them to keep everyone alive. Ray lost a piece of his exosuit and I used my powers to grab it, but that weakened the field around me and a bullet hit my upper arm.

“Ow!” I yelped. It had only grazed me, but still. It hurt to get shot. It was odd and painful.20 I closed my eyes and hissed at the ache. Len was kneeling before me when I opened my eyes. “It’s okay,” I told him. “I’ve had worse—”

Len stood and tried to sweep me off my feet, literally. I flailed until he put me down, because him princess carrying me out of the building wasn’t feasible. Mick lit up a crate of hand grenades a few seconds after that. Len grabbed my hand in one of his while he held the cold gun with the other. “We go,” he snarled, “ _now_.”

* * *

“Well,” Ray said after we were aboard the Waverider again, “I’m glad you were the one calling the shots.”

“I had it under control until the professor started picking fights with the PLO,” Len snarked back.

“You let your ego endanger our entire mission,” Carter told Martin.

“No,” Martin objected, “Mr. Rory’s temper got completely out of control!”

Mick held up his hands in mock surrender. “I thought we were friends, professor!”

I slumped into the closest seat and shucked my jacket. There was a hole in the sleeve from the bullet that I was planning on patching, so I could keep the bomber jacket itself.

“Stop fighting about whose fault it was!” Shawna teleported into the med bay and back to command central with scissors and gauze in the split second after she finished yelling. “Mac is hurt, and she’s the only reason you guys are still alive right now, in case you didn’t notice her stopping every bullet that could’ve hit any one of us back there.”

At that, she ripped open the seam around my right shoulder and cut the sleeve off to check the wound. I mourned the loss of that shirt, because it was really comfortable, especially compared to dress shirts made in the twenty-first century.

“Oh,” Sara turned and looked at me. “That’s why nobody got shot? Because you were using your powers to stop the bullets?”

I nodded and winced as Shawna cleaned the wound. “Ow,” I whined again.

“At least there’s one less nuclear bomb on the planet,” Kendra pointed out.

Rip started a slow clap of his own as I left the room to change into something less bloodstained and torn up. I didn’t hear the explanation of what the future held for Central City with a piece of atomic tech in the hands of a man like Savage—if I had, I would’ve shown them the gadgetry inside my skirt pocket. I returned after Kendra brought the newspaper article that had been in Aldus’s pocket when he died. There were a lot of plot points in pockets that day, apparently. Len noticed as soon as I entered the room and glanced at my arm first, his brow furrowing, his jaw clenched, his mouth pressed into a thin worried line. I shuffled around the table to where he was while Kendra explained that she couldn’t read the incantation on the dagger and Carter offered to help her remember the language.

Len gently touched the gauze covering my arm, ever the tactile person, learning by feeling. “Doesn’t it hurt?” he asked softly after I didn’t flinch at the pressure from his fingertips.

I shook my head slowly. “Gideon has pain medication from the future,” I told him, “and I’m not even loopy. It’s awesome.”

“Good.” Len splayed his left hand over the small of my back and pulled me closer. I wrapped my arm loosely around his waist and leaned into him with my whole body while he hunched to kiss my forehead.

“Now,” said Rip, “as for the dagger—”

“You need someone to steal it,” Ray deduced.

“Okay,” Len snatched the piece of paper from him. I could practically hear him thinking, _mine_. “Fine, whatever, I’ll do it. Article says it was purchased by some rich Russian douchebag.” At that, he started to walk out with me still tucked under his left arm.

“I’ll go with you,” Ray offered.

“I’ve already got partners,” Len snarked back.

“Who we trust even less than you,” Ray pointed out.

“Rude,” I huffed. I’d taken one for the team. Hell, I literally took a bullet. I figured after that, his lack of trust was uncalled for.

“Look,” said Rip, “you’re more than welcome to go with them. Just don’t take along any of your future tech.”

Ray nodded and went to remove his exosuit. Rip dropped us off at the house in St. Roch that belonged to the Russian douchebag, then set a course to Ivy Town. Shawna and Mark stayed on the ship, for some reason. It had been the longest day, so I didn’t question their choice to stay behind.

Later, she told me they’d gone to Stanford to give her father the cure for Huntingtin’s disease while he was napping in his dorm between his classes in the morning and his job in the afternoon. That’s what Shawna had come for.

Anyhow.

I’d stolen a leather jacket from Len. It smelled like him, which made me feel so cozy. I would’ve been embarrassed by that, but I slept with his unwashed shirts when he wasn’t around, so I was past the point of no return.

Len told me not to use my powers to break into the house, in case fulgurkinesis didn’t work on seventies technology. I figured he had a point, because everything was completely different in the seventies. I felt the airwaves of the radio frequencies broadcasting and electricity fizzing in the powerlines, but it wasn’t the same. There was no internet, no cell networks, no cloud, no streaming data, no connective tissue, not like there was in the future. I hadn’t realized how loud all of the things in the future were until I visited the past, actually.

“I’m seeing motion detectors on the ground floor,” Len told us, “hardware on the doors looks standard issue.”

“I can’t see any smoke alarms,” Mick said with a slow grin. That meant he wanted to burn the house down. Whoops.

“Stay close.” Len squeezed my hand, but didn’t let go. “I saw at least three armed guards on the perimeter.”

Mick nodded. “Right, boss.”

I side-eyed Len. “So you’re the boss now?” I whispered.

“Well,” Len whispered back, “you do let me boss you around when we’re alone, hmm?”

I flushed pink in the dark because he wasn’t wrong and made a quiet garbage disposal noise. That’s when Ray decided he should go rogue.

“What the hell?” Mick snarled as softly as he knew how.

“I recognize the security system,” Ray explained gleefully, “my parents had this exact one!” he opened the access panel. “I’ll have the access code cracked and security disabled before you can say breaking and entering.”

I used my cane to unfold from my previous squatting position and shuffled over, resisting the urge to say “breaking and entering” out loud and prove him wrong. Len kept holding my hand while Ray made his mistake. I knew about dummy boxes from being married to a thief, and I felt it when he triggered the silent alarm that alerted the guards—the signal was clumsy and cacophonous in my head, but it did what it was designed to do.

“Hey,” Ray turned and smiled crookedly, “we’re in.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Mick grumbled.

“Why’s that?” Ray asked, genuinely confused, like a kicked puppy.

“Because you just tapped into a dummy box,” I told him softly.

“Which means those guards are gonna be here,” Len explained in his most condescending voice.

“Quicker than you can say rookie mistake,” Mick finished our explanation as the guards came up behind us. Len had to let go of my hand to punch one of the guards in the face while Mick knocked the other one down, the synchronicity of their longtime partnership obvious in how they moved together.

I shuffled onto the porch and picked the lock. Ray followed me, settling into the role of lookout. “Where’d you learn how to pick locks?” he asked. “Is that something your husband taught you?”

“Nope,” I shook my head slowly and smiled when the deadbolt clicked out of place as if on cue. I’d learned how to pick locks from a kid in detention on Earth-33—he’d bought a set of lockpicks online, and he taught me how to break into lockers once the teacher in charge of detention went to hide in the teacher’s lounge. It was more educational than any other experience I had at that school.

“I taught her a lot of things,” Len opened the door for me and gave Ray a smirk that oozed innuendo, “but picking locks wasn’t one of them.”

I made a louder garbage disposal noise and shuffled inside the house. There was a room filled with antiquities, six objects in the center of the room encased in glass, one containing a mace I knew had belonged to Kendra in one of her past lives, one containing a bronze war helmet that might’ve been something Carter had worn at some point.

Ray found the dagger and bent to look through the glass. “Is there a trick to opening the case?” he asked.

Len side-eyed him before he broke the glass with his fist. Mick smashed four of the other glass cases, all except the one that had the mace inside. I wondered if I should take it for Kendra, but knew if I tried to break the glass I’d probably hurt myself.

“What are you doing?” Ray asked, his voice pitching higher in distress. I was surprised he hadn’t seen it coming, honestly. What had he expected from a pair of thieves? “Just grab the dagger and let’s go!”

“Raymond,” Len said in that condescending tone again, “you don’t break into a candy store and steal one gumball.”

“You guys grab the goodies,” Mick stood and went to leave the room and grabbed my forearm, “we’ll go find the safe.”

“Okay…” I shrugged and let him drag me away. I figured that leaving Ray and Len alone was a terribad idea, but Mick was much stronger than me and so I rolled with it.

I had to pee, so I went looking for a bathroom while Mick was doing his thing. I did my business, wiped my ladyparts, washed my hands, and shuffled out into the hallway.

That’s when Damien Darhk used his telekinetic ability to pin me against the wall. “Well, well,” he said. “If it isn’t lightning girl,” he smiled when I struggled and said, “care to make a spark for me?”

I screamed when he touched my face to absorb the energy that was always striking inside me, and felt him siphoning it from me jolt by jolt. I kept screaming while I felt the electrical impulses in his brain, so much louder than I’d ever heard from anyone. I figured it was because he could use magic—and magic was energy, and energy was electricity, and electricity was lighting.

I quit screaming and reached out for the energy fueling his power to take it from him. I yanked and took everything he’d stolen from me, and more. Then he screamed and started to age past thirty, past forty, until he looked the same way he had on _Arrow_.

It was me. I’d stolen his youth. Whoops.

Here’s the thing: Damien must’ve come to see Savage for some reason, the guards had probably told him to wait inside, and he had sensed me. I’d gone upstairs to find the bathroom, and he tried to steal from me. I wasn’t immune to his powers, but my fulgurkinetic abilities meant I could turn his magic against him. Damien was also killed by Savage in the comics. Not that he stayed dead, but still. It was an odd coincidence that he was in the same place and time as Savage on that day in 1975, given that connection from the source material.21 Which had possibilities I wanted to explore once we returned to the present, but more on that later.

I left him on the floor, snatched my cane, and shuffled downstairs. Mick was bleeding from a head wound on the floor, Len and Ray were locked in a cage, and Savage was pointing a gun at them. That’s why my husband looked so murderous: because Mick was hurt and Savage had done the hurting. I knew that feel.

“Nope!” I paramagnetized the revolver into my hand and shot the immortal psychopath in the back. I knew it wouldn’t kill him, but it made me feel better. “Not today, asshole.”

I thought about taking the cage apart, but it was simpler to send it back where it had been lurking before it fell on Len and Ray. That’s when I noticed Firestorm was on the balcony. I waved and stepped aside to give him an unobstructed view of his target.

Savage was still on his feet, despite the bullet in his spine, and he saw what I saw. “Oh,” he snickered, “the burning man.”

“I don’t just burn, pal.” Jax threw fire at Savage that knocked him back through the front door. “I blast things too,” he quipped as he touched down beside us. “Hey,” he looked at Mick, “you okay?”

“I’m pissed,” Mick snarled.

“Mac?” Jax asked.

“I’m awesome,” I told him.

That’s when Len fisted one hand in my hair and kissed me so thoroughly I forgot there were other people in the room. “I heard you scream,” he whispered after he broke the kiss and pressed our foreheads together. “Thought I’d lost you.”

I nuzzled his nose with mine and felt the tension bleed out of his shoulders. “I’m not going anywhere unless it’s with you,” I told him softly.

Len exhaled a raw gust of air before he untangled the hand in my hair and took my hand in his instead, intertwining our fingers as we left the house. Rip, Mark, Shawna, Sara, Kendra, and Carter were waiting for us outside.

“It’s all good,” Jax said. “Savage is down.”

“Savage is not defeated by earthly means,” Carter told him.

“Well,” Jax squared his shoulders. “I hit him with a nuclear blast, so, you know, not that earthly.”

“I shot him in the spine.” I yawned without bothering to muffle the noise because one hand was preoccupied with my cane and Len was holding the other. “Not that it did anything except make me feel better.”

Shawna offered me a high five. I tucked my cane in the crook of my elbow and pressed my palm against hers.

Len gave the dagger to Carter hilt first. “Go get that son of a bitch,” he said.

Carter and Kendra flew off to, well, do what he’d said. That’s when something beeped. Sara looked at me with her eyes comically wide. “Oh my god!” she yelled, “alpha particles!”

“Wait,” I asked. “What?”

“Ray lost a piece of his suit,” Sara told me, “and it doomed the whole future, so the professor took me and Jax to meet his younger self and steal his alpha particle tracker, but we couldn’t find any alpha particles, because you’ve got them!”

“Is she high?” Mick wanted to know.

“Yes!” Sara pointed to him with the forefingers on both hands. “Yes, I am.”

“Oh!” I reached into the pocket of my skirt and extracted the missing piece of tech, “you mean the thing I got shot for.” I offered the circuitry to Ray. “I would’ve given it back to you sooner, but I kind of forgot I had it. That’s my bad.”

Rip gaped at me in shock, pun unintended. “You had it this whole time?” he yawped.

“Yeah,” I elongated the _ah_ sound awkwardly, “sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.” Ray grinned at me before he unshrunk his exosuit and rewired his laser cannon to the vambrace. “You saved the future.”

Sara nodded, her blonde hair bouncing over her shoulders as her head bobbed up and down. “You saved the world,” she told me.

That’s when the guards arrived. Len dropped my hand to draw his cold gun while I generated a wad of lightning in one hand. Mark was brewing a storm and using the wind to fly around, but when he tried to use lightning it struck me twice. I fell to my knees and clutched my cane with both hands, adapting to the inductance. I was shining, lit up and full of light, and when I rose again my eyes had whited out with power. I didn’t know that’s what it looked like at the time, but I knew something was wrong with my eyes because I could _see_ energy like I never had before. I had no way of knowing if that was a side effect of siphoning the life out of Damien or what, but an odd calm settled over me, like I had become the heart of the storm. I generated a bright vein of electricity that hit every single guard and took all of them down like dominos. I was panting like I’d run a five and a half minute mile, everything hurt, and suddenly I needed a nap like I needed air.

I passed out right then and there. Len carried me into the ship while Mick carried Kendra, whom Savage had stabbed in the spleen after he stabbed Carter in the heart.

I woke up alone in the room I’d picked out with one of the blankets I’d brought tucked over me; someone, probably Len, had taken off my shoes and my glasses. I kicked the blanket off before I unfolded my glasses and shuffled out into command central barefoot and bespectacled, not bothering to put my orthopedic shoes back on. Shawna must’ve been in the med bay with Kendra, because she wasn’t in command central. Jax and Len were sitting next to each other in one pair of seats. Sara was sitting alone. Ray, Mark, Martin, Mick, and Rip were all standing. I wobbled and propped myself up against where the hallway folded into the room itself.

Len interlaced his fingers and leaned forward in his seat. “So what you’re really asking is, do we want to fish or cut bait?” he bit down on the consonant and I could practically feel the clench in his jawline, “return to 2016 and live out the rest of our lives as insignificant losers, or…”

“Make another play at becoming legends,” Ray interjected, “figure out how to end Savage and save the world.”

“Preferably without causing anymore nuclear explosions,” Martin added for good measure.

I’ll admit my heart flipped in a particularly uncomfortable way after Len called himself a loser, because I figured that meant he thought his future with me wasn’t worth returning to.

Mick caught my eye from across the room and gave me a tiny nod. I smiled at him even though I was about to ugly cry where I stood up against the metal wall of the ship. “Savage has my attention,” he said.

“Look,” Len rose and gestured with one hand to indicate everyone who stood around the table, “we didn’t know Carter from Adam, but if you take out one of my crew, you’re going to pay the price.”

“Surely Captain Hunter has a sound plan,” Martin eyed Jax. “What about you?” he asked.

“Well, I say we kick Savage’s ass,” Jax nodded enthusiastically, “for Carter.”

That sentiment went around the table, and even the Rogues were echoing it. “So,” Mark splayed both hands over the tabletop and looked to Rip. “Where are we going next?”

“It’s been a long day,” I yawned through the word _day_. “So before we take another leap through time, I think we should all probably get some sleep. I know I need to another power nap before someone tries to kill me, y’know, again.”

Rip nodded. “I suppose we can stay in one time and place for tonight,” he said. I figured he was giving me what I wanted because I’d saved the world. That was good enough for me.

I yawned again before I shuffled down the hallway. Len caught up to me halfway to our room. I propped my cane against the wall. Len shucked his parka and sat on the bed while I flopped onto my belly and buried my face in the closest pillow. “What exactly happened to you while I was locked in that cage with Raymond?” he asked in his calmest voice, with a thread of murderous intent woven through his tone.

“Damien Darhk—the dude who Mick nicknamed Master Race at the arms bazaar and whose name is the most obvious name for a supervillain, ever—tried to use whatever magic powers he has to make me into a meal because he eats raw energy and I’m full of electricity. I screamed because he was literally siphoning the life out of my body,” I exhaled with enough force to flap my lips, “and I almost died before I turned his powers against him. I spent the whole day fighting for a future with you, I got shot, I could’ve been killed by a magician with a terribad name, and hearing you saying we’d be living out our life together as insignificant losers if we’d stayed in the present was just the icing on the worst cake in the multiverse.”

Len swept my hair away from my face and stroked my cheekbone with his thumb. “That’s not what I meant,” he told me softly.

“Whatever,” I retorted with my glasses askew because I hadn’t bothered with taking them off. “I’m going back to sleep.”

“Mac,” Len exhaled in frustration after he said my name. “I wasn’t talking about us.”

“Okay,” I stretched the _y_ sound out into another yawn. “What’d you mean?”

Len heaved a sigh. “Rip didn’t know we’re married,” he kept touching my hair while he spoke and each stroke of his fingers generated tiny sparks that I snuffed out in midair. “What if we’re not together in his future? Thieving’s not my only mission. I’m fighting for a future with you, too. That’s what I want,” he said with slow vehemence. “It’s all I really want.”

I was shocked—pun unintended—that I didn’t ugly cry. I propped myself up on my elbows and fixed my glasses so I could look him in the eyes without squinting. “It’s okay if you also really want to steal things,” I told him. “I know how much you love being a thief,” I squirmed until I was sitting up and touched his face gently with my bad hand, “and I liked it when you called me your partner.”

“Well,” Len pressed his palm against the back of my hand and kissed the inside of my wrist. “Mick’s my partner in crime, you’re my partner in everything else. That wasn’t in our wedding vows, but it really should’ve been.”

I bit my bottom lip when he scraped his teeth over the pulse on the inside of my wrist. “Is it weird that I got kind of turned on watching you fight?” I whispered.

Len smirked and shook his head slowly. “I’ve been thinking about lifting up that skirt and going down on you all day,” he said in that low intimate voice. “It was becoming a problem.”

I smiled and quit touching his face to undo the belt around my waist. Len watched me pull the sweater vest up over my head, along with the shirt underneath. I didn’t have the knee socks on anymore, so I was just in the skirt and my underthings. “Yeah,” I deadpanned. “That’s the opposite of a problem.”

I crawled into his lap and kissed him, nipping his bottom lip while he fisted one hand in my hair and smoothed the other underneath the skirt to grab my ass. Len slipped his tongue into my mouth, flicking his tongue against mine. After getting struck twice by lightning and eating _qi_ like an esoteric cannibal, it was enough to make literal sparks between us. I whimpered and curled my fingers into the nape of his neck. Len groaned and kissed me harder, cradling the back of my head and pulling my hair a little bit to make me moan softly.

I tugged on his shirt and he broke the kiss to take it off. Len unhooked my bra while I kissed his neck and down to the hollow of his throat. I nipped his collarbone and buried a moan there when he cupped my breasts and brushed his thumbs over my nipples. Len made a hoarse noise for me when I generated a low voltage of electricity and dragged both hands down his chest, giving as good as I got.

That’s when somebody knocked on the door to our room.

“Mr. and Mrs. Snart,” said Gideon, “Dr. Palmer is requesting entry because he wants to discuss the particulars of time travel.”

Len tugged my nipples roughly between his thumbs and forefingers. I moaned and my hips jerked without my permission, so I ground against the hard length of him through his pants and my panties. “Tell Raymond we’re busy,” he growled.

“Tell him to come back when we’re not banging like a screen door in a hurricane,” I suggested.

Len chuckled, delighted by my euphemism, and tangled his fingers in my hair again as he kissed the words tattooed along the curve of my shoulder.

“I still don’t understand early twenty-first century colloquialisms,” Gideon told me, “does ‘banging like a screen door in a hurricane’ mean sexual intercourse?”

“Yes.” I nodded once, slowly. “Yes, it does.”

That’s when Len slipped his other hand between my legs and stroked one fingertip into my slit through my panties. “I think you should keep the skirt, hmm?” he whispered conspiratorially into my ear.

“I’ll keep the skirt if you keep the jacket with the elbow patches,” I retorted.

“Deal,” Len murmured before he changed the game and pinned me down. I squirmed under him while he took his time kissing my breasts and belly. Len took the skirt off, then my panties, but he didn’t lick me. I propped myself up on my elbows to watch him kissing my inner thighs and blushed when he looked up from between my legs to meet my eyes. Len smirked and blew a puff of cool air over my heated flesh. I might’ve squeaked a little bit. Len grinned at the noise and stroked the coarse damp curls between my legs. “Cute,” he told me smugly.

I exhaled a soft whoosh of air. It did nothing to extinguish the heat coiling through me. I shivered and my breath hitched inside my throat. “Len,” I whispered, “please.”

Len used his fingers to spread me open and I tugged my bottom lip between my teeth when he licked his lips. Then his mouth was on me, his lips a soft pressure against the folds of my cunt, his tongue stroking along my slit in slow drags before he stopped and took his mouth away. I whimpered, the high noise obscenely loud and heavy with how much I wanted more. Len smirked, pleased with himself, the asshole. “You taste so _good_ ,” he told me fervently before he flicked the flat of his tongue over my clit.

I made a sharp, desperate sound when he teased the hard nub in quick swirls. Len buried his face between my thighs to eat me out with vulgar, enthusiastic noises that buzzed through me like so much electricity. I said his name, sighing and moaning and gasping the monosyllable with every firm swipe of his tongue. Len tugged my clit between his teeth and gave it a rough lick that made me shake. I unspooled and whited out there for a few blissful seconds. I didn’t realize my eyes had fluttered shut until the phosphenes flared into the darkness behind my eyelids.

Len nuzzled my belly and nipped tingling kisses into the fleshy bits of my inner thighs, idly tasting and touching me while I put myself back together after he’d taken me apart. “I want to bite you,” he stroked one finger over the inside of my left thigh with intent and looked up at me with his face still wet from eating me out, “here.”

I nodded, but he needed explicit verbal consent. That’s what we’d negotiated for in the beginning, after all. “Okay,” I whispered.

Len slipped two long fingers inside of me and crooked them to rub my g-spot with his fingertips while he sank his teeth into the flesh of my thigh. I trembled and clutched at his head with both hands, the pain and pleasure getting all tangled up as he made his mark and fucked me with his fingers. Len gently squeezed where my thigh met my hip as I dug my heel in against his back, his other hand on me while his fingers moved inside of me. I came after he quit biting me, the sensation of his tongue sweeping over his mark enough to push me over the edge again. Len grabbed my hand before I could muffle the loud moans that ensued. “Don’t be quiet,” he ordered in a low voice threaded with raw need. “I want to hear you.”

Then he swept his thumb sideways over my clit and made me come again, the ebbing of my first efflux swept into another orgasm that boomed through me like thunder. Len held me down as my hips pitched up violently and slipped his fingers out of me, sucking my slick off them while I whimpered through the aftershocks. I recollected myself and squirmed into a sitting position to watch him take his pants off, along with his underwear. Len fisted one hand in my hair and stole a kiss so hot I was tingling when he tilted my head up to kiss my chin.

I ended up kneeling with my back against his chest while he played with my breasts and took me slowly from behind. Len strung a line of sucking kisses down my neck and fucked me harder when I begged for it, his thick cock working me open while I shifted my hips to augment his thrusts. I came and clenched tight around him after he nipped a particularly sensitive place behind my ear, clutching at his forearm with my bad hand and moaning loudly without bothering to cover my mouth. Len grit his teeth and fucked me through the trembles in my thighs until he came inside of me, gasping my name and burying a sharp exhale in the frizzy tendrils of my hair.

There was only one bathroom on the Waverider, but I had more toilet paper than anyone could ever possibly need—except in the event of a zombie apocalypse—so I didn’t have to leave the room to clean up the mess he’d made between my legs. I put on a clean pair of panties and took off my glasses before I crawled into bed with him. Len pulled me down so I was half on top of him, my breasts squishing against his chest as his arms wrapped tight around me. I tangled my legs up with his, curling my bad hand over his shoulder while my other arm ended up getting squished in between our bodies. Len splayed the fingers of one hand over the small of my back and pressed his other palm into the hollow between my shoulder blades.

I nuzzled his collarbone and closed my eyes, using his other shoulder as a pillow. “I love you,” I whispered into the hollow of his throat.

Len swept my bangs to one side and kissed my forehead. “I love you, too.”

Our first mission aboard the Waverider ended not with a whimper, but a bang. T. S. Eliot, eat your heart out.

* * *

**Scene III**  
Out of the Void Space 

* * *

Here’s the thing: I took my meds twice a day, once in the morning and once at night. I took my antianxiety meds and my antidepressants at night. I took my vitamins and my birth control pill in the morning. I took my pain meds when I was in pain and never otherwise, but that was neither here nor there.

I hadn’t been taking the pill. I didn’t notice it until I went to take the pill in the morning of our second mission aboard the Waverider, but my pills were off. Or they weren’t, and they should’ve been.

I’d spent three weeks on Earth-33 and I hadn’t been taking birth control.

Len and I had been having _so much unprotected sex_. Like, all of the unprotected sex. Twice a day, if not thrice. With multiple rounds. Len didn’t come inside me every time he came, but he could’ve gotten me pregnant dozens of times during those few weeks. It was a shock—pun unintended—that my period hadn’t returned with a vengeance during the family reunion. Hell, I was a twenty-seven-year-old woman married to a forty-three-year-old man whose father had been impregnating women into his early fifties. It’d be a shock—pun unintended, again—if I wasn’t pregnant.

I couldn’t believe I’d been so scatterbrained. I guess I was so happy to see my family, when I thought I’d never see them again, that it slipped my mind.

Len proposed because he didn’t want to let me get away, but he didn’t want to stop being a criminal either. We had never talked about having kids. I assumed he didn’t want to. Hell, I didn’t want to. Certainly not on a time ship currently stranded in the feelgood decade. Maybe not ever.

Unfortunately that’s when we landed in Leipzig, Germany and Kendra started convulsing on the table in the med bay. I could feel the pieces of the dagger moving within her body, tearing up her insides on their way to her heart. I didn’t know how to get them out of her without making it worse, so I didn’t try. I left the med bay after I told Shawna what was happening to her, because I was an egocentric bitch and I was thinking about whether or not I was knocked up. I couldn’t ask Gideon to give me a futuristic pregnancy test while Kendra was dying slowly, though. I wasn’t that selfish.

I found my husband in command central and sat beside him before he could pull me onto his lap. Mick was pacing, his impatience clear in every move he made. Mark was brewing a tiny storm between his cupped palms, breaking literal ice to avoid talking to anyone he didn’t know or like. Sara was leaning up against a chair across from Len, and Jax was talking to Gideon over the table in the center of the room.

Len focused on me and narrowed his eyes at my face. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I retorted. It wasn’t a lie. I didn’t know whether I was pregnant or not, so there was nothing to tell. I figured I’d drop that bomb when I knew for sure there was a bomb to drop. I didn’t want to make it more of a possibility by telling him. I was that selfish, and scared, and a thousand other feelings I was ignoring like a boss.

Len smoothed an arm over my shoulders and idly stroked his fingers along my bare upper arm instead of pulling me closer to him. I scooted to press my thigh against his, which made him smile without baring his teeth, one corner of his mouth unfurling while my heart clenched horribly in my chest.

It must’ve looked incongruous with him in all black—a dark jacket over a black long-sleeved shirt, black jeans and boots—and me wearing a yellow sundress festooned with black hearts over fishnet stockings and Oxford flats with orthopedic inserts. I also had a pretty bow on my head, black ribbon and floral lace clipped over the heavy duty barrette holding the kraken that was my hair half-up. I knew we looked mismatched: a criminal and a librarian, things that didn’t go together like rama-lama-lama ka-dinga-da-dinga-dong.22

Gideon—in the Time Vault, not on the time ship—had said we’d have two kids: Malcolm, and Zenobia. What would they inherit from us? Our shared tendency to make terribad puns? His criminality? My fulgurkinesis? His varicolored eyes? My snake hair? His perspicacity? My anxiety? His genetic potential for dementia? My autoimmune disease?

Rip walked briskly into command central while I was busy overthinking. I missed him explaining how Kendra was doing, but that was okay because I was the one who’d deduced what was happening with the fragmented dagger seeking her heart like a guided missile inside her body.

“Can’t we just time jump into the future where they’ve got the stuff that could fix her?” Jax wondered.

“This ship is from that very same future and has thus far been unsuccessful in saving her,” Rip explained, the frustration that permeated his tone aimed at the entire situation rather than at Jax.

Len curled his fingers into the flesh of my waist through my dress. “Kendra wouldn’t survive the time jump anyway,” he said.

Rip arched his eyebrows, surprised. Unfortunately when he turned to face us he’d done so without the dramatic whirl of his duster, because he’d worn a different brown coat.

“I pay attention,” Len deadpanned.

“To sum up,” Mick stopped pacing to give us our daily dose of exposition, “Carter’s dead, his girlfriend’s not too far behind, and Vandal Savage is sitting pretty in 1975, which we’re all now stuck in.”

“That how your plan’s supposed to work, Rip?” Mark asked, his voice clouded with sarcasm.

“Obviously not,” Rip bit down on the _t_ sound at the end before he gesticulated down the steps from the captain’s quarters, “but the mission is simple: we stop Vandal Savage here in the past and we save the future.”

It would’ve been a great speech, if nobody had noticed the agitation made obvious by how rapidly he was talking with his hands.

Len cocked his head and pressed his lips into a thin line before he spoke. “Simple don’t mean easy, Captain.”

Never had I ever heard the word _captain_ said in such a condescending tone, and I made fun of his codename every chance I got.

Rip shook his head, using arrogance in place of armor. “Oh, I never said it was…”

I rolled my eyes at him, a nonverbal _judging you_.

“…the benefit of being a Time Master is that the length and breadth of history gives one perspective,” Rip inhaled sharply and kept speechifying. “I’ve seen darker days. I’ve seen men of steel die and dark knights fall, and even then I accomplished my mission no matter what.”

Gideon explained the damage that was done to the time jumping part of the ship and Jax reluctantly agreed to try and fix it. What a good.

“What about the rest of us?” Mark asked.

“Yeah,” said Mick, “do we just…” he opened his arms to bring everyone else in command central into it, “…sit?”

I figured that was exactly what Rip wanted us to do. I stood and shuffled off, intent on finding out whether I was pregnant or not before we left the seventies. Len slowed down and fell into step beside me while Mark overtook us, calling dibs on the only shower on board.

Len waited until we were alone in the hallway to cup my face in one hand and back me into the wall. “Well,” his thumb caressed my cheekbone while he hunched to whisper lowly into my ear, “as long as we’re stuck here, I can take your mind off whatever’s bothering you, hmm?”

I exhaled with enough force to flap my lips in a futile attempt to unclench. There was stubble on his face, which didn’t help. I thought about him burying his face in my neck, the rough texture of his unshaven jaw against the tender skin of my throat while his hands were all over me and he was inside of me. That’s what I wanted, but I knew it wouldn’t be any good if the gravid Sword of Damocles was looming above my head. “Len,” I sighed, “the last thing I need right now is more sex. No offense.”

“None taken.” Len took a long step back and folded his arms. “Unless I did something last night that you didn’t like—”

I knew he meant he’d take offense if I didn’t tell him that I wasn’t into it, not that he’d take offense if I didn’t like something he’d done. Len cared a lot about my consent, and my pleasure. I loved him so much for that. It made him unequivocally the best man I had ever known.

I shook my head so fast my glasses almost slipped off. I adjusted them and met his eyes. “No,” I told him, “you didn’t do anything wrong. I’m just—”

That’s when I heard Mick, whose footsteps were surprisingly light considering his bulk and eerie resemblance to a bull in a china shop. “I’m hungry,” he told us, “you guys wanna break outta here and go scare up some breakfast?”

I was nodding when Len overheard Gideon talking about the oldest bank in the world. Sara was convincing Rip that he needed to bring her as backup on his mission to bankrupt Savage when Len emerged from the hallway with me and Mick behind him.

“Somebody say bank?” Len asked in the smooth voice he used to make winning speeches.

I flopped into my chair and heaved a longer sigh. I should’ve taken advantage of Len being distracted by the possibility of thieving and retreated to the med bay then and there, but I stuck around because I wanted my husband to know I wasn’t mad at him.

“Your services aren’t required, Mr. Snart.” Rip made a quiet, frustrated noise. “This is clearly reconnaissance.”

“We know how to case banks,” Mick pointed out. “We’re practically bankers.”

“Except we take the money _out_.” Len enunciated the consonant at the end and mimicked stealing imaginary cash.

“Yes,” Rip said in a way that was probably meant to be patronizing but came off as petulant, “and when I need someone to steal something, you’ll be the first to know, I assure you.”

Mick circled around the table, slow and with predatory intent. Len moved the same way while Rip held his ground. “Listen, Englishman.” Mick got into his personal space and I noticed he was taller than Rip by a little bit. “I’m getting bored being stuck on this tin can and when I get bored, I make bad decisions.”

I scoffed. “Mick, you make bad decisions no matter what.”

Len smirked at what I’d said before he got in between them. “Now, now, now,” he used his hands to diffuse the situation and put one palm on Mick’s shoulder while he picked Rip’s pocket with the other. “We’re all on the same side here. My hotheaded friend and I just want to be helpful. That’s all.”

I glanced at Sara, but it looked like no one else but me had noticed what Len could do with his hands—pun unintended. Ugh!

“Duly noted,” Rip said before he and Sara walked out.

“You should’ve let me punch him,” Mick snarled and tugged on the cuffs of his gloves.

“Yeah,” Len tilted his head and extracted the piece of tech he’d stolen from his pocket, “but then we wouldn’t have gotten this.”

That’s when Ray came running into command central. “Mac!” he shouted, then dialed it back after he realized how loud his inside voice was. “Your superpowers include the ability to induce paramagnetism in nonmagnetic metals, right?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I nodded once, slowly. “Why?”

Here’s the thing: Raymond A. Palmer—Ray’s granduncle and namesake—purchased and published Isaac Asimov’s first short story when he was an editor at a sci-fi magazine.23 Anna had told me this and that Ray grew up reading Asimovian stories, so I wasn’t surprised his plan to save Kendra involved going all _Fantastic Voyage_ on her.24 I wasn’t even surprised that it worked. After all, I was in the land of comic book science.

I paramagnetized every bit of the strange metal in her body while Ray used his laser cannon to destroy them. It was touch and go there for a while, but eventually all twenty fragments and every last shard was obliterated.

Unfortunately, when he emerged from her bloodstream, my cane had moved from my knee in between my thighs and my skirt had ridden up. Ray caught sight of the mark through the fishnet material of my stockings and gave me a horrified look. “Snart did that to you,” he asked in a voice so harsh I flinched a little bit, “didn’t he?”

“Yeah,” I told him with a nod, “but it’s not what you think—”

Martin snorted. “I’m sure it’s exactly what we think,” he gave the mark a quick glance and looked away. “I think we all know what kind of man your husband is. Don’t bother denying it.”

I wanted to yank my skirt down and cover the mark, but doing that would convince them I had something to hide. I exhaled a soft whoosh of air, forcing myself to meet their eyes instead. One after the other. Unflinching. “I’ve been in two abusive relationships. I’ve been raped and made to think I was ugly and unlovable by anyone but a boy that promised me nobody else would ever…” I tugged my bottom lip between my teeth and gnawed on that before I attempted to articulate further. “Len is _not_ like those boys. Len does abusive things sometimes—he’s possessive, he’s jealous, he’s manipulative, he’s selfish, and none of that goes away because he’s in love—but when I call him on his abusive behavior, y’know what he does? Len stops, he apologizes for doing it, and he never does it again. That’s the kind of man he is. That’s also the difference between an abusive relationship and a healthy one.” I used my cane to get back on my feet and resented how short I was compared to both of them. “Don’t,” I spat out a spark on the consonant, “talk about who I married like you know better than me. Because you know _nothing_.”

That’s when Kendra started convulsing again. I couldn’t feel any remnants of the metal, so I figured it was a metaphysical problem. After she yelled something about Carter and Sara and Vandal and whatnot, Martin asked Gideon to search for their location, someplace called the Grey Hill Building.

“I’ve already searched for it,” xe told us, “on behalf of the Captain, who’s there now with Ms. Lance, Ms. Baez, and Mr. Mardon.”

“What?” Ray gave Martin an incredulous look. “They left without us?”

“It’s a mansion several miles away,” Gideon said helpfully. “Apparently there’s some sort of private event.”

“How the hell could Kendra know that they’re there?” Martin wondered.

“Maybe the same way Savage knew Carter and Kendra were on the roof of the arms bazaar,” I deduced, “they’re all connected by the same curse that keeps Savage alive. Carter dying outside his time period might have terribad consequences, if Savage kept his body. I mean, ancient Egyptians did really weird things with corpses, and he was a high priest of Set at some point during the period of reunification. Maybe he can do something with a dead Hawkman. That old black magic called love? I don’t know.”25

I was flying by the seat of my pants, metaphorically, and quoting the Ella Fitzgerald version of a Glenn Miller single written by Harold Arlen. I might’ve also accidentally made a necrophilia joke at Savage’s expense. At least he could afford it, considering we hadn’t even put a dent in his wealth.

“That makes as much sense as anything else we’ve been dealing with since we accepted this mission,” Ray pointed out.

Martin acknowledged our logic with a frazzled nod. “Gideon,” he said, “get me Jefferson.”

“Mr. Jackson is not on board,” xe informed him, “he’s on the jump ship with Mr. Snart and Mr. Rory. I’m patching you through.”

“Jefferson?” Martin asked, concerned. “Jefferson, where are you?”

Jax hesitated before he answered: “Well, it’s not a short story.”

“There’s no time,” Martin said, “Gideon will upload you coordinates to the Grey Hill Building. Rip, Sara, Shawna, and Mark are in danger!”

That’s when I heard Len speak. “We’re on our way, professor,” he said. There was a thread of tension in his voice. I figured something must’ve gone wrong with the heist he’d hijacked Jax and the jump ship to pull.

“Okay,” I said to Gideon, “where did they go?”

“Central City,” xe told me, “to steal the Maximillian Emerald from Central City Museum and visit 1629 Hadley Avenue.”

I knew Len well enough to figure it out from there. Lewis got caught stealing the emerald in 1975, he went to jail, and he was never the same after his first incarceration at Iron Heights. Len’s mother—Liane Snart, née Lawrence—had kidney disease and they didn’t have insurance after his father went to jail, so his mother died of renal failure when he was five. That’s why it bothered him to watch me get stuck with needles: it reminded him of going to dialysis with his mom, of watching her die slowly.

Liane was also the one who’d called him Leo. After she died, no one ever called him that again.

Len ended up living with his grandfather until his father was released from prison. Lewis met Lisa’s mother—Layla Snart, née Goldberg—and remarried when he was nine. Layla left a few months after Lisa was born. Lewis was abusive, Len became a criminal, and he couldn’t leave his sister in that house with their father, so instead he lived at home until he was thirty and took whatever their father gave him to protect Lisa.

I guess killing his father once hadn’t been enough for my husband. Apparently a chance to change his past was worth risking everything: his sisters, our marriage, the future he’d said he was fighting for.

“Oh, fuck it.” I huffed. “Gideon, use your weird futuristic medical technology and tell me whether I’m pregnant or not.”

Ray turned to face me, his eyes comically wide. Martin side-eyed me over his shoulder. “Perhaps now isn’t the time,” he told me shortly.

I didn’t realize communications were still open until Mick shouted, “Snart knocked you up?”

“Bet you’re glad you didn’t accidentally blink yourself out of existence before you knew you were gonna be a dad,” said Jax.

Len didn’t say anything. I felt my stomach drop, the squelchy feeling in my guts unpleasant and unwelcome. What if I was pregnant and he didn’t want a baby? What if I was pregnant and he _did_ want a baby? I didn’t want any of that, not at this point in time.

“Mrs. Snart is not pregnant,” Gideon told us after xe scanned me with the futuristic version of a portable ultrasound. That was anticlimactic, but I didn’t care because I was so happy to not be knocked up.

“Oh, thank fuck.” I heaved a ginormous sigh and shrugged the weight of that possibility off my shoulders before I extracted my earpiece from my pocket.

Shawna and Mark had split up from Rip and Sara to find another way into the Grey Hill Building. I figured Mark had flown them in while Shawna piggybacked and they hadn’t gotten captured because the blood cult was distracted by other intruders and, y’know, immortality. Shawna teleported into the med bay to grab me and bring me into the mansion. I needed to throw off sparks, the fulgurkinetic equivalent of blowing off steam.

Mark side-eyed me. “Don’t steal my thunder,” he quipped.

That’s when I saw Len, Mick, and Jax at the other end of the hallway. All of my anger bled out of me while I looked down and challenged the floor to a staring contest. This wasn’t about me. Now that I knew I wasn’t pregnant, it was about my husband and whatever had been going through his head to make him think changing his past was worth risking our future. I wasn’t mad at him anymore. I just wanted to hear whatever he had to say later, when we were alone, in the aftermath of rescuing our favorite assassin and a former Time Master whose mastery of time was questionable at best.

I lost the staring contest with the carpet when Len tilted my face up, looking into my eyes through his goggles in the eerie red darkness Savage had chosen to highlight—or lowlight—his blood cult aesthetic. There was indecision in his touch that wasn’t there before. I felt him falter, the pressure of his fingers under my chin hesitant and unsure while his eyes searched my face. I’d never seen him so insecure, so undone. It was subtle, but I knew he was feeling that way because I knew him.

I kept one hand on my cane and wrapped my other arm tight around his neck. Len froze as I stood on tiptoe and pressed myself against him to kiss his throat. I hated not being tall enough to kiss his lips unless he met me halfway.

Then his palm smoothed over my jaw and his fingers curled into my hair. Len didn’t kiss me, though. Instead he heaved a sigh and exhaled a quiet desperate sound, like he’d been starved for oxygen until he was close enough to inhale me.

“Guys,” Mick said impatiently, “we’ve got a party to crash.”

“It’s a creepy blood ritual,” I pointed out.

“That’s my kind of party,” Mick retorted.

I side-eyed him while I shifted my weight off my bad ankle. Mick grinned and broke down the door, not bothering with the heat gun until he had something more alive to aim at.

“Let’s get this party started!” he shouted.

“Here’s our invitation,” Len deadpanned and shot a man in the chest. I was glad he was having fun. That would’ve made me a bad person if the dude he’d shot hadn’t been a member of a blood cult formed to worship an immortal psychopath.

There were too many people in the room for me to do either thing I’d tried in this decade—the simultaneous EMP or the chain lightning reaction—so I did it the old-fashioned way: by zapping my enemies one at a time. Len backhanded a man so hard he flopped to the floor like a broken doll. I figured he was picturing his father. Mick cut through the rope binding Sara’s wrists. I had to keep telling the lightning Mark generated when he brewed his storms not to strike me, which was distracting as fuck. Shawna had apparently thought ahead enough to find Rip’s gun and the knives Sara had brought with her, so they ended up armed once their wrists were unbound in the literal and figural sense of the phrase. Len punched a man in the face and I heard something crack, probably the unhinging of his jawbone.

That’s when Savage shrieked “enough!” and threw a blast of raw blue energy over the table with the corpse that had been Carter on top.

I shuffled in front of the blast, palm up, and grabbed it with the hand I wasn’t using to grip my cane. I held it there, a stream of light, and then ate it. Well, technically I absorbed the energy through my hand, but the outcome was the same: I got the power, and he lost it.

Savage ended up losing the ground he’d hoped to gain, which gave Jax and Mick a chance to grab the dead Hawkman from the table. Then he generated another pulse of energy, a dome of blue light that spread through the room and knocked everyone back except me. I stood between Rip, who’d fallen ungracefully on all fours, and my husband. Len crouched, every line of his body predatory despite being on his knees, and looked up at me to make certain I was okay. I held my ground and stole the energy from the dagger that Savage was holding until nothing was left to be used against us.

“This is not your boomstick,” I deadpanned while my eyes whited out.26

Savage didn’t looked pleased that he’d lost to a tiny crippled girl in a yellow sundress with a black bow in her hair. Mick and Jax had carried the body out of the room during the confusion. Mark was holding his side and wincing as Shawna teleported him away, probably back to the Waverider, before she blinked into the room again. Sara was fighting what goons were still left standing, a very few.

“Go,” Rip yawped over the ringing in his ears, “I’ll deal with Savage.”

“Good luck with that,” Len snarked back at him before he took my hand and practically dragged me out of the room.

* * *

It was fuck off o’clock in the morning—any time between two AM and eight AM was designated as a fuck off hour—by the time we flew to Central City at warp speed, not wanting to stay in Leipzig after the blood cult shenanigans. Rip went to see Kendra in the med bay after he asked Mick and Sara to dig a grave for Carter. Mark had broken a rib during the fight, but it wasn’t the first time he’d done it and it wouldn’t be the last.

Ray left the med bay to corner us before Len could get me alone. “I own both of you an apology,” he said in a heartfelt voice that let me know he meant it, “you were right. I know nothing about you except what Anna told me, which is that you’re this amazing girl who saved my best friend when I couldn’t get to her in time and gave her a home when I couldn’t deal with her coming back from the dead.”

Whatever else they were or would become again to each other, Anna was Ray’s best friend. That wouldn’t change. I’d saved her from being fridged like so many comic book women before her. That meant I mattered to Ray, even though he didn’t know me any other way than peripherally.

“I shouldn’t have assumed you would hurt her because you were abused and I shouldn’t have assumed you were being abused from the bruise on your thigh.” Ray glanced down at my skirt because he’d seen the mark underneath. “I don’t get it, but—”

“I bite her,” Len enunciated the words like he was talking to someone who didn’t know how to listen, “she likes it.”

“Well,” Ray backed off a little bit when he noticed how angry my husband was, “as long as it’s consensual.”

“Yeah,” Len snarled, “it always is. I’d never do anything to her that she didn’t want, Raymond.”

“That means he accepts your apology,” I told Ray, “we both do.”

Len nodded once, a slow descent of his chin, and folded his arms. “Now go away so I can have a private conversation with my wife about how she thought she was pregnant and she didn’t tell me.”

Ray held up his hands in surrender and backed off, throwing one last glance over his shoulder on his way out to help Mick and Sara with the gravedigging. I figured he was curious about the whole pregnancy thing, not concerned for me because he was leaving me alone with Len. That was progress.

I shuffled into the room equidistant between the hatch and command central and sat on the bed. Len stood before me, his arms still folded, head cocked in a nonverbal _start talking, Mrs. Snart_.

“Okay,” I sighed, “apparently I wasn’t taking birth control on Earth-33, but I didn’t notice until this morning, even though we got back to Earth-1 two weeks ago. Kendra was dying, so I couldn’t ask Gideon for a futuristic pregnancy test, and a pregnancy test in this decade is basically a chemistry set. I wasn’t going to use primitive measures to learn whether my loins were fruitful, okay? I figured I’d wait until Kendra was stable again before I asked Gideon for help, and I didn’t tell you because that would’ve made it more of a possibility. I was scared, Len.”

Len widened his eyes a fraction, a sliver of hurt unfurling in the corners of his lips before he narrowed his eyes. “Of having my baby?” he asked.

“No.” I shook my head slowly. “Of becoming a mom when there’s still so much I want to do before I do that. Hell, there’s so much you probably want to do before you become a dad. Like killing your dad again in the past because shooting him in the present didn’t change anything like you thought it would.”

Len grit his teeth, his nostrils flaring with the force of his exhale.

I wanted to kiss the clench in his jawline. I arched my eyebrows at him instead. “I know you,” I told him softly. “I know you thought about destroying our future just to watch your father die again for what he did to you. It’s okay. It’s okay to still want him dead after you tried to save him. It’s okay to hate him. It’s okay—”

That’s when he knelt smoothly on the floor before me and held me while he buried his face in the hollow of my throat. “I do,” Len growled. “I hate him so much. I saw myself. I saw _me_ , before he ever raised a hand against me. I wanted to get me out of there, out of that house, away from the man my dad becomes,” I stroked his hair while he shuddered and dug his fingers into my back through my dress, “but you know what the worst part is? I _miss_ him. Never father of the year, but I miss who he was before he hurt us, before he hurt me. I just wanted that guy to be my dad again.”

I didn’t realize he was crying until I felt his tears fall hot on my skin. I swallowed thickly and nuzzled the curve of his head through the rough texture of his hair. Len held me closer while I caressed his back with my good hand. I kept my bad hand on the nape of his neck. I was crying too, at this point. I cried at the drop of a hat. It wasn’t the first time I’d cried over him. It wouldn’t be the last. “It’s okay,” I whispered through my tears. “What he did to you wasn’t okay, breaking your heart, but you’re okay. I’ve got your heart. It’s mine now. I won’t break your heart. Not ever. I love you,” I told him. “I love you so much. No matter what.”

If he’d changed the timeline, I hoped I’d love the version of him that wasn’t a survivor like me. I figured I’d learn.

Len tugged down the collar of my dress and licked where his tears had fallen between my breasts. I whimpered as he nipped at my cleavage, then moved his mouth to my neck.

“Okay!” I stretched the _oh_ sound out into an _ooh_ when he cupped my face in one hand and scraped his teeth over a particularly sensitive place on the side of my neck. “I know you’d rather do things—or do me—than deal with all of your feelings, but we should probably ask Gideon whether you actually changed the timeline.”

Len made a disgruntled noise low in his throat and tangled his fingers into my hair to pull me into a thorough kiss, all heat and _want_ , before he disentangled himself from me and rose to his feet.

I was blushing so hot I was probably far infrared on the electromagnetic spectrum when he took my hand again. I asked Gideon to forecast a new timeline for Lewis with my brain as I shuffled into command central with our fingers interlaced. I hated myself for being scared that we wouldn’t work as well as a couple if he’d never been abused. I had no idea who he would’ve been if that had never happened to him. Maybe a good cop like his Earth-3 counterpart from the comics, whom the Earth-3 version of Mick killed when the Earth-3 version of Barry—Jonathan Allen—forced them to fight to the death and then killed Mick after he won.27 Or someone like Ray, with the best intentions but no understanding of what being a survivor meant.

I hated myself even worse when I realized he hadn’t changed anything. Hell, it was possible he’d created a causality loop by stealing the emerald that had made Lewis’s first incarceration at Iron Heights an inevitability.

Len held a back issue of the _Central City Citizen_ from 1975 that he must’ve brought with him as a reference while he looked at the forecast. “Maybe you didn’t understand me,” he tightened his grip on my hand until I made a soft noise in protest and he noticed he was squeezing my fingers too hard. “I asked for the new timeline.”

“This is the new timeline,” Gideon told him, “two days from now your father will be arrested trying to sell the Maximillian Emerald to an undercover police officer.”

“That stupid son of a bitch,” Len growled.

“He’ll be arrested and sentenced to five years in Iron Heights,” xe continued in xyr mellifluous tone. “Despite your intervention, his future remains unchanged.”

“Hey,” Jax approached from the other side of the table, “you tried to save him. That’s got to count for something.”

Len inhaled sharply. “Turns out it doesn’t,” he deadpanned and bit down around the consonant at the end.

I turned to see Sara returning from the gravesite outside, her arms swinging as she walked until she halted at the bottom of the ramp. At least the Waverider was wheelchair accessible, I guess. There she glanced between me and my husband and gave his back an apologetic look. “Come on,” Sara said.

“Where are we going now?” Len asked with a thread of frustration lingering in his harsh tone.

“To say goodbye,” she told us, her throaty voice soft and heavy with solemnity.

It was a beautiful morning for a funeral, all told: autumnal, gnarled old trees with falling leaves, warm sunlight that filtered down on everyone who stood over the gravestones with their epitaphs that simply read _Carter_ and _Aldus_ in black letters.

Len splayed one hand at the small of my back and rubbed slow circles over the lumbar curve of my spine with his thumb as Rip spoke. I was clutching my cane with both hands because it was more difficult to stand in one place than it was to move around. I tucked my cane in the crook of my elbow as I shuffled away, snarling my fingers like the roots of the old trees to pop my joints. Len kept his hand on me and smoothed his palm up my back until his arm was around my shoulder. I was tempted to put my hand in his back pocket, but decided this was not the time for that. Kendra had lost her soulmate. It wasn’t the opportune moment to flaunt that I still had mine.

I was folding myself into the seat across from the captain’s chair when Rip came running into command central. “Gideon, ready us for takeoff!” he said.

“Whoa,” Jax leaned forward in his seat, “are we being chased or something?”

“No,” Rip shook his head, “but I imagine that right about now the museum has realized that their prized emerald is missing.”

“You want me to say I’m sorry?” Len asked in the same harsh tone.

“I don’t do sorry,” Mick added.

Rip sighed at that. “Which is fine, Mr. Rory, because you are owed the apology.”

Mick furrowed his brow in confusion. That was unexpected.

“I should have told you all before that this wasn’t my first attempt to vanquish Vandal Savage,” Rip explained, “but the reason I failed—”

“Was because you didn’t have all of us,” Ray interjected from his seat beside Sara.

Mark shifted uncomfortably in his chair next to Shawna, his broken rib aching despite the futuristic pain medication Gideon had ostensibly given him. Still, he was grinning. Awesome.

“Well,” said Martin, “obviously Dr. Palmer and Mrs. Snart and I had our hands full tending to Ms. Saunders,” he glanced at Kendra in her seat beside Jax, “but now that she’s back on her feet…”

“We’re back to full strength,” said Rip, smiling at that because Kendra was the one person on board who could take Savage down permanently.

“Or strong as we can be,” Kendra told him quietly, “without Carter.”

Rip nodded. “Quite true, but there is no point in continuing any further unless we are all—myself included—committed to working in concert.”

“Well,” I yawned into the hollow of my palm. “I think we did better than expected last night, considering you made Savage run into his knife ten times,28 and I got to eat that weird blue energy he was throwing around like confetti.29 Mark broke one of his ribs, but otherwise we’re okay. It’s been a couple of days in linear time, so for people who’ve only known each other forty-eight hours, I’d say we’re a great team.”

Shawna got my references, but nobody else did. Apparently we were the only people who liked musicals aboard the Waverider.

Gideon had calculated a ninety-eight percent likelihood that Savage would show up again in 1986. I didn’t bother pointing out that xe had also calculated a ninety-four percent likelihood that we wouldn’t choose to accept this mission. I strapped myself in and yawned again instead.

“Guess we’re headed to the eighties,” Ray stated the obvious, “better break out your parachute pants.”

“What the hell are parachute pants?” Jax wondered.

Ray gaped a little bit, mouth gone slack with the realization that he was getting old—even though he technically wasn’t born yet at this point in time.

I giggled. I couldn’t help it! I was picturing Len in parachute pants, a fashion disaster he might’ve worn as a teenager in the eighties. I covered my mouth with my bad hand and wheezed just before we jumped.

* * *

**Scene IV**  
Within Space Life 

* * *

I was still wheezing as we arrived in the eighties and hovered in midair instead of landing someplace. I eyed one of the screens, which told me that we were in the airspace over a place I had visited before in the future.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Rip asked.

“Ugh,” I groaned.

“Walk in the park,” Len snarked back. “Where are we now?”

I pointed at the screen just as Rip said: “Washington, DC…” he spun in his chair to face us, “…the year is 1986.”

Martin rose to give us context. “We’ve landed at the height of the Cold War in a world poised for nuclear annihilation,” he said.

“Okay,” I unstrapped myself and pointed my toes to pop my bad ankle, “what I want to know is whether we arrived before or after Chernobyl happens on April twenty-sixth. Savage is totally in bed with the USSR and I don’t want to be anywhere near the radioactive fallout in Pripyat. I’m immune to electromagnetic radiation like gamma rays, but particle radiation like alpha and beta decay is a whole different kettle of fish. No one here would survive except those with access to the Firestorm matrix. Oh, hot damn. That’s not my jam.”30

Rip shifted uncomfortably. “Today is April twenty-third,” he told me, “three days before Chernobyl.”

I made a garbled noise in my throat. “Oh,” I groaned, “we’re going to end up retroactively causing the Chernobyl disaster, aren’t we?”

Mick grinned. “Sounds awesome.”

“No!” I yelped and flailed both hands at him, “death by radiation poisoning is the antithesis of awesome! Not even you could take the heat.”

Len chuckled, delighted by the bad pun, and smiled at me as I used my cane to get back on my feet and shuffled until I stood next to him. I smiled back, showing my slightly crooked teeth. Len smoothed an arm around my shoulders and stroked my clavicle with his thumb as I put my bad hand on the edge of the table for balance. I shifted my weight off my bad ankle, leaning into him sideways with my whole body, tucking my head under his left arm.

That’s when Gideon materialized as a disembodied head floating over the tabletop. “We’ve arrived here because I have a new lead on Vandal Savage’s location.”

“Savage is the worst and this is the Cold War,” I pointed out, “he’s in the USSR. I’m going off my eighth grade World History education from a parallel universe here, but still. It’s a no-brainer.”

“Yes,” Rip grumbled. “I’m not doubting your powers of deduction, Mrs. Snart, but we need more than your word to go on. Gideon managed to intercept this telefax concerning Savage’s last known whereabouts.”

“Um,” Jax stepped closer to the table to get a better look, “a tele-what?”

“It’s like an e-mail…” Ray faltered in his explanation when he realized that telefaxes were the opposite of e-mail, “…on paper.”

“Wow,” Mick side-eyed Rip when he noticed the digital copy of the file Gideon had access to was blacked out, “that’s totally useless.”

“Dude,” said Jax, “the whole thing is crossed out.”

“It was redacted,” I told him, “that’s why.”

“Which is why we are here,” Rip informed us, “to steal the original file on Savage from those who are tracking him.”

“Oh,” I stretched the noise out into awkward territory when I noticed the airspace we were occupying was above the Pentagon. “Oh no.”

“Uh,” Ray elongated the short vowel sound into my discomfort zone, “that’s the…”

“Don’t worry,” Rip held up his hand as everyone moved closer to the windshield to gape at the Pentagon below, “we are cloaked.”

Mark arched his eyebrows in a nonverbal _are you fucking kidding me?_ “You want us to break into the Pentagon,” he said incredulously.

Shawna folded her arms and cocked one of her hips, silent but deadly. “Seriously?”

“Sounds awesome,” Mick retorted.

Kendra side-eyed him over his shoulder. “It sounds _crazy_ ,” she told him.

“What’s the plan?” Sara asked.

“Oh,” said Rip, “the fabricator will fashion you the necessary clothing and credentials.”

“Ooh!” Ray made a gleeful little squealing noise that sounded odd coming from the mouth of a grown man, “and don’t forget our G-Man disguises.”

“Okay, Chip.”31 I quipped. “Or would you rather be Melvin Purvis?”32

“I was thinking of the book on Al Capone by F. D. Palsey,” Ray told me with a grin, “but I do love old spy movies.”33

“Actually,” I told him, “the first recorded use of the word ‘G-Man’ was in a book published in 1917 by an Irish woman, so originally it meant a political detective in Ireland, even though it was popularized to mean F. B. I. agents. Also, it was a thing in _Ulysses_. James Joyce used it twice, once in ‘Lestrygonians’ 34 and once in ‘Cyclops.’”35

“Wow,” Mick turned to look at Len, “you married a nerd.”

“Yeah.” Len gave me that filthy smirk and idly stroked the words tattooed along my shoulder. “Such a librarian, hmm?”

I blushed hot, equal parts aroused by how much he liked it when I did my librarian thing and embarrassed that I’d geeked out in front of everybody. “Sorry,” I gnawed on the inside of my cheek and kept my eyes on the tabletop, “nerd alert.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Ray grinned wider, “you’re in good company.”

Rip glanced over his shoulder impatiently, a nonverbal _get on with it_.

Ray kept grinning until it turned crooked. “Always wanted to be a spy,” he said.

That’s how we ended up breaking and entering the Pentagon. Rip planned an unnecessary elaborate mission to steal the file. Len and Ray were disguised as janitorial staff, Kendra, Sara, and Shawna were in uniform, Mick and Mark had gone undercover as army men, Firestorm was in the basement, and I decided to go rogue.

Here’s the thing: I wasn’t conventionally attractive. I was cute, but I had never been pretty. Len could say it all he wanted, but I knew it wasn’t true. I was too short and fat to ever be considered pretty by the world at large. I was also great at going unnoticed. That’s how I got into the counterintelligence department while everyone else was screwing around: I walked in and took the files I wanted.

There was a file on Lady Flash, who’d fallen into a coma in the present and hadn’t awakened despite her connection to the speed force. I wanted to read it, wanted to know whether or not I should wake her up after we defeated Savage and returned to 2016. I scrambled the closed circuit camera footage while I worked my magic.

Sara opened the door after I was elbow deep in classified information. I held up the file on Savage and wordlessly held it out to Shawna while I stole the file on Joshua Clay.

“How did you get here before us?” Kendra asked, whispering like we might get caught.

I used my powers to unlock another drawer, thumbing through those files until I found one on the Blackhawk Squadron that I tucked into my bag. “People see a pretty face and they wonder why they’ve never noticed you before,” I told her. “People see me and they assume I’ve always been around. It’s one of the perks of being a wallflower you might’ve read about.”36

Sara exhaled a quiet little snort. “I’ve only known you for two days,” she told me, “but I’m pretty sure you couldn’t be a wallflower if you tried. I think you care too much to sit back and watch.”

I could’ve told her about how I’d let Eddie Thawne die, or Ronnie Raymond, or anyone Len killed onscreen that I didn’t save. I could sit back and watch when it suited me. After all, that was what I did when I thought none of this was real.

I took a few more files I thought might be about characters from the comics and shuffled toward the exit. I had no idea why Jax was handling the electrical grid instead of, y’know, me. I felt it when Firestorm generated an electromagnetic pulse.

“Oh,” I faltered when I felt the alternating current pass through both of them. “Oh no—”

That’s when the alarm went off. I had no idea how to stop it. Shawna gave the file to Sara and teleported to where Mark was just as Mick decided that setting the Pentagon on fire was a good escape plan.

I was debating whether or not zapping Kendra would make her stop clawing at actual government agents like a real bird of prey when Shawna came back for me, linking our arms at the elbow before she teleported me out of the frying pan. I noticed Mick and Mark were in command central too after she teleported back to the Pentagon. I figured she must’ve brought her best friend back aboard first, then our arsonist, then me. Sara was next and last, because Ray and Len got back to the ship on their own while Jax brought Kendra shrieking like a hawk trying to eat a police siren and choking in the process.

Rip, who’d been running mission control from command central during this debacle, was hunched over the table with his judgmental face on when we were all reassembled before him.

I arched my eyebrows at him in a nonverbal throwing of shade. “If you’d let me go in alone like I suggested, nothing would’ve gone wrong. Hell,” I flopped into a seat and exhaled with enough force to flap my lips, “the only reason the government doesn’t have footage of Kendra sprouting wings and going berserk is because I used my powers to destroy the security camera feeds.”

“Instead of dwelling on what went wrong,” Ray interjected as he folded himself into the chair next to me, “let’s focus on the positive.”

“What are you talking about?” Mick asked, genuinely bewildered by the possibility that anything had gone wrong. “It was awesome.”

“In the same way that tsunamis, earthquakes, and other natural disasters are awesome,” Martin retorted in a voice that oozed sardonically.

“We got the file on Savage,” Kendra pointed out.

I didn’t bother to clarify that I had gotten the file. I focused on Rip instead. “Have you ever had a team like this before?” I asked him. “Have you ever had a team at all? Because it seems like you don’t know how to plan missions with so many people—”

“Well,” Rip chided, “need I remind you that I intended to have a team of nine, myself included, not eleven?”

I snorted. “Rip, I’m fulgurkinetic. Firestorm didn’t need to be on that mission at all. Nobody should’ve gone in there but me and maybe Len or Shawna, in case I needed an extraction contingency. Hell, I could’ve gone in with Ray inside my pocket, he could’ve embiggened to grab the file and shrunken back inside my pocket with it. Then we could’ve left through the front door. Whether you intended to have me here is irrelevant. What’s relevant is that you’re a terrible leader. Savage has escaped us three separate times now and you didn’t even think to bring him and his knife on board so Kendra could stab him at her convenience after you temporarily gutted him last night. I planned a better op than you with no prior experience when my best friend was abducted by A. R. G. U. S. two months ago. I’m not saying I should lead, but I am saying that you’re wasting the resources you have while squandering opportunities to complete your mission. That has to change if you want to get anything done,” I muffled a yawn in one palm, “and sometimes working in concert means someone gets a solo.”37

Martin and Jax had been fighting amongst themselves while Sara tried to blame Kendra for what had gone wrong. I didn’t notice everyone was listening to what I had to say until I was done talking. I felt suddenly awkward, like I’d probably said all of the wrong things. I had never been a team player. I was the odd loner who ended up doing all of the work on group projects in science class while other people screwed around with the Bunsen burner. That wasn’t going to fly here.

“Gideon, any luck with our purloined secret file?” Rip asked with a huff of pure exasperation, and just a dash of exhaustion. “Please say yes.”

“Yes, Captain.” Gideon said in xyr disembodied voice. “According to the Pentagon, Savage has defected to the Soviet Union.”

“Hey,” Sara nudged my good leg with her foot as gently as she knew how, “you were right.”

It was a no-brainer, like I’d said. It was also the worst possible outcome. Chernobyl and the Hindenburg combined.38 “I kind of wish I’d been wrong,” I told her softly.

“So the most powerful evil the world has ever known has gone red at the height of the Cold War,” Martin said.

“Now he’s going to help them cook up something that kills the future,” Ray glanced at me, “maybe something even worse than Chernobyl.”

Rip hunched over the tabletop, palms flat and face austere. “Gideon, set a course to the Soviet Union.”

* * *

I went to take a nap while we flew across the Atlantic. I figured the Waverider could probably cut what might’ve been a twelve hour flight in half, but that was still six hours. Len crawled into bed with me and took my hand in his to kiss my fingers. “I want you,” he said in that low, intimate voice. “That brain of yours is sexy as hell.”

“Thank you,” I told him softly, “your brain is sexy too. Although the logic behind my solo mission that never happened was that everyone else on the ship is too pretty for covert ops.” I tugged my bottom lip between my teeth when his smile unfurled into a filthy smirk. “Don’t tell Rip,” I whispered.

“I promise,” Len murmured before he cupped my face and kissed me hard.

I gasped into the kiss as his hand fisted in my hair and scooped my fingers under his shirt. I charged my fingertips and caressed the contours of his stomach. Len smoothed his other hand up from my hip to cup my breast and tease my nipple, swirling his thumb over my areola through layers of fabric. I escalated by unbuttoning his pants and stroking him through his underwear. Len moaned, sharply. I kissed his neck and wrapped my hand around his hard length, swirling my thumb over the head of him while he thrust up into my touch. Len cradled the back of my head in one hand and nuzzled my hair while he unbuttoned the front of my dress with the other.

“How?” I whispered as he tugged down one silk cup of my bra to rub my nipple roughly in between his thumb and forefingers, “How do you want me?”

That’s when Ray walked into the room, so I didn’t get to hear his answer. Apparently the door hadn’t shut behind us. There we were, Len with his dick in my hand and me with one of my breasts out, the mechanized door wide open. I blushed hotter than a ghost pepper and finagled my breast into my bra again before I buttoned my dress back up, fumbling when my bad hand spasmed like it sometimes did.

Len smirked at Ray over his shoulder. “See anything you like, Raymond?” he asked in a low voice that was half innuendo and half frustration at being cockblocked.

I buried my face in my non-spasmodic hand to muffle an indignant squeak. Ray ignored that, averting his eyes until Len put his dick back into his pants. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” he quipped and exhaled a shy, awkward chortle.

“Let me guess,” Len tilted his head and looked up at Ray, “you want to talk about time travel.”

“Yeah,” Ray glanced at me. “If you wouldn’t mind telling me your theory.”

I didn’t quite know where to start. I was working with years of consuming absurd quantities of comics and sci-fi, supplemented by a rudimentary knowledge of quantum mechanics and theoretical physics. “Okay,” I said, “so you know the difference between heliocentrism and geocentrism?”

“I do,” Ray nodded, “heliocentric motion basically makes a bunch of circles that never intersect, while geocentric motion creates points of intersection between particles.”

I nodded. “That’s basically what I think the multiverse looks like,” I explained, “both within the context of the fifty-two parallel earths that exist—including ours—and in the context of multiple timelines within one reality. Newton’s third law applies to the many worlds interpretation, in that every choice we make creates multiple timelines: the equal, the opposite, and everything in between.” I was talking fast, but Ray was nodding and grinning like he was interested in what I had to say, so that was okay. “There is a world in which Savage got ahold of your laser cannon and reverse-engineered it,” I explained, “because that timeline was created the moment that piece of your exosuit fell off, even though it was inside my pocket the whole time in our version of reality.”

Ray followed that logic to form a conclusion. “Which is why Gideon was able to forecast the worst possible outcome,” he deduced, “even though you averted it and saved the world in the process.”

I loved that he got what I was talking about. It was great having another geek to talk to. Cisco had been hanging out with Harry without me. I had gotten a little bit lonely in my geekdom of solitude during the meantime. “Exactly,” I told him. “Here’s where my theory gets weird.”

“Ooh,” Ray grinned wider at that, “weird is good. I like weird.”

“I’m technically from an alternate future,” I told him, “one in which a speedster named Eobard Thawne—the Reverse-Flash, or Professor Zoom—existed. Eobard actually ceased to exist on May nineteenth, which is what caused the singularity that destroyed half of Central City, so his future remains intact in another timeline—”

“But not our timeline,” said Ray.

I nodded again. “I call his timelines the Antecedent Timelines,” I explained. “There’s the Quaternary Antecedent Timeline, in which Eobard grew up with a younger brother named Robern.39 After he used the speed force to keep Robern from existing, he created the Tertiary Antecedent Timeline, in which he worked at the Flash Museum, where he met Rose Russell, a reporter for _Central City Science Today_. Eobard created the Secondary Antecedent Timeline when he used the speed force to kill her fiancée, and he created the Primary Antecedent Timeline when he used the speed force to traumatize Rose by killing her father in front of her when she was a child. Rose committed suicide at the psychiatric facility she grew up in as a ward of the state, and a future version of Barry created the Antecedent Convergent Timeline when he brought the infant Rose to a world in which Eobard didn’t exist.” I paused to breathe and swallowed thickly while I inhaled a ginormous lungful of air. “I’m Rose Russell,” I clarified, “or I was in the Antecedent Timelines. I don’t remember being her, though. I only know what I know because this is a TV show adapted from a series of comics in the reality where I grew up. I read about Rose in the issue that established the backstory for Reverse-Flash when it came out in 2011 on Earth-33,” I tugged my bottom lip between my teeth and exhaled sharply before I articulated, “I didn’t know it was my story. I had no idea any of this was real.”

“So your world doesn’t have superheroes who aren’t fictional characters,” Ray deduced.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think the point of divergence between the parallel earth I’m from and everywhere else is that metagenes don’t exist on Earth-33.”

“Which is why your metagene didn’t turn on until you were in our universe!” Ray grinned impossibly wider and flailed a little bit. I nodded yet again. I figured my metagene would’ve activated even if I hadn’t arrived right when the particle accelerator exploded, but that was just a theory. I’d never know for sure. “Cisco told me that our universe is Earth-1,” he held up one finger, “and that you guys have been fighting metahumans from Earth-2,” he held up two fingers, “because there are fifty-two breaches in Central City where the parallel universes converge. That’s so cool.”

I arched my eyebrows at him. “Barry totally murdered two of those metahumans,” I told him.

“Oh.” Ray wilted like a delicate flower. “That’s awful.”

“Thank you!” I unclenched my tiny ineffectual fists. I hadn’t even realized I was making fists. “Nobody else listens to me when I talk about the ethical treatment of metahumans.”

“I do,” Len pointed out, taking offense at the implication that I didn’t think he listened when I talked.

“Yeah,” I sighed, “but no one on Team Flash does. Which is ridiculous, because Cisco and Barry are both metahumans—”

“Wait,” Ray held up both hands with palms out as if to say _hold up_ , “Cisco is a metahuman too? That’s _awesome_.”

I’d apparently outed my vibe-y friend to our mutual atomic friend. Whoops.

“What’s his superpower?” Ray asked. “Inquiring minds want to know.”

I shook my head so fast my glasses almost fell off. “Nope,” I said, “if Cisco didn’t tell you, I’m not going to. I shouldn’t have assumed he told you. That’s my bad.”

“Why didn’t he tell me?” Ray wondered, the corners of his mouth drooping sadly.

“Cisco doesn’t want to be what he is,” I generated a wad of electricity in my palm and idly stretched it out into a vein of lightning, “what we are. Eobard gave him superpowers and caused the mutagenesis that created most of the metahumans in Central City, and he was evil—”

“So,” Ray interjected, “by the transitive property, all metahumans are evil too.”

“Yeah,” I heaved a sigh. “It’s such a false equivalence. That’s why I told Cisco to run my Twitter account.”

I had started an Official Lady Zeus account on Twitter to create the hashtag #NotAllMetahumans. Other metahumans in Central City used the hashtag to tweet about their evolution and the way having superpowers impacted their daily lives. It was totally anonymous: everyone got a codename, and I used my powers to keep their personal information—IP address, location, and whatnot—inaccessible to anybody prejudiced against my kind. It gave us visibility to change the perception that all metahumans became criminals and murderers once their abilities manifested. It also started discourse on how some metahumans didn’t want to be heroes like the Flash, or me. That was a valid choice. Hell, sometimes I didn’t want to be a heroine. I just wanted to read a book or sleep all of the sleep.

Anyhow. I eventually got back on topic and kept talking about time travel.

“Eobard used the speed force to go back in time and killed Barry’s mother,” I explained. “Which created what I call the Primary Divergent Timeline. Which in turn becomes the Primary Convergent Timeline after the singularity, when the breaches are created between Earth-1 and Earth-2. Barry created the Flashpoint Timeline before the singularity happened, a reality where his mother never died and Citizen Cold is the hero of Central City.”

Ray side-eyed Len. “Seriously?” he asked with a thread of incredulity woven into the cadence of his voice.

Len smirked and took my bad hand to idly play with my fingers while I spoke. “I read the _Flashpoint_ comics you brought with you from Earth-33,” he said. “I’m no hero, not in any world, hmm?”

“Well,” I hedged, “you’re a good cop on Earth-3…”

“Where I die in a fight to the death with my partner,” Len deadpanned. “No, thank you. I prefer this world,” he lifted my hand to his lips and kissed my knuckles. “Where you exist, and you’re mine.”

I flushed bright as the lightning in my other hand fizzled out. “I call our timeline the Secondary Divergent Timeline,” I told Ray, “in which the point of divergence is that I exist. There are four other timelines, what I call the Darkest Timelines. There’s the Darkest Timeline created on March twenty-fourth, in which Mark creates a tidal wave big enough to destroy Central City and Eobard murders Cisco. There’s the Darkest Timeline created on December twenty-third, in which Savage kills pretty much everyone by using the Staff of Horus to nuke Central City. There’s the Darkest Timeline in 2166, Rip’s future, and the Darkest Timeline in 2046, in which we never return to the present and everything goes to hell. That’s all I’ve got so far.”

“Okay,” Len cocked his head and gave Ray a speculative look, “unless you’re up for a threesome, Raymond, you should go away now so I can fuck my wife.”

I was making indignant noises—because I was totally _not_ up for a threesome and I knew Len well enough to know he was only halfway joking about having one with Ray—when I felt a familiar strange interface. Chronos had apparently tracked us from 1975 to 1986. I flailed until Len quit holding my hand and shuffled out of the room to warn Rip. It had only been four hours, but we were in Soviet airspace. I guess the Waverider was faster than I thought. Didn’t stop Chronos from catching up to us, though.

Len and Ray fell into step on either side of me as the door to command central slid apart with a metallic hiss, the opening mechanism depressurizing. “We run out of gas or something?” Len asked, his question half deadpan snark and half morbid curiosity.

“Chronos is still in pursuit,” said Gideon, “weapon systems tracking.”

“Look,” Jax leaned anxiously over the tabletop as he watched Chronos gaining on us, “if this is your idea of trying to lose him, then man—”

“Aha,” Rip held up his hands triumphantly before he pressed his palms flat against the table, “the Soviet air force to the rescue! Let’s see how badly Chronos wants to follow us.”

Ray went to look out through the windshield at the Soviet plane. “Wow,” he said, “it’s a Mig-21. No one’s ever been this close to one before.”

“Are you quoting _Top Gun_?” Len asked, taking his turn at incredulity.

“Maybe,” Ray told him.

“Okay,” I flopped into my seat and crossed my legs to hold my cane between my knees, “now Len has to say ‘You can be my wingman anytime,’ and Ray has to say ‘Bullshit! You can be mine.’”

“So now I’m Iceman,” Len deadpanned.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, you are.”

Ray grinned over his shoulder at me. “So that makes me Maverick,” he deduced.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it does.”

That’s when Rip told Gideon that cutting the engines was necessary to dodge the heat-seeking missiles fired by the Soviet plane. I groaned internally when the emergency landing protocol turned out to be Gideon telling us what our altitude was.

I unstrapped myself and rose up, reaching out for the geomagnetic field and condensing the airspace all around us to slow our landing speed. I generated kiloteslas, more energy than any pulsed magnetic field ever obtained on earth. I had to concentrate to keep myself from overloading into megateslas and decaying like a magnetar. I lit up like a supernova instead and it took everything I had to avoid collapsing into a neutron star after the ship touched down. I flopped onto my knees, my bad hand clutching the edge of the table.

Rip turned in his chair once I was done. “Welcome to the USSR, ladies and gentlemen.”

“Ugh,” I groaned externally.

Martin emerged from the hallway with the file and offered me a hand up once he reached the table. I took it and my legs shook with the effort when I stood.

“Nope,” I popped the _p_ sound and flopped into the closest empty seat. “Thanks anyway, professor.”

“You’re very welcome,” Martin replied as he opened the file on the tabletop, “but I should be thanking you, considering you just saved us from crash landing into the Soviet Union.”

Rip unfolded himself from the captain’s chair. “Did you get anything on Savage?” he asked the professor.

“It appears our friend has been quite busy since we last saw him,” Martin told him.

“Svarog?” Rip frowned in confusion.

“Slavic god of celestial fire and blacksmithing,” I yawned and elongated the suffix _ing_ , “he was only mentioned in the _Hypatian Codex_ , a compilation from the fifteenth century which contains the Slavic translation of a passage from the _Chronographia_ , a Greek manuscript written in the sixth century. Svarog is another name for Hephaestus, or Vulcan, and that manuscript named him as the father of Dažbog, a major solar deity in Slavic mythology.”40

“Yes,” said Martin, “it’s also a secret project the Soviets are working on, and considering Savage’s involvement, it’s most likely some sort of weapon.”

Len crouched to look me over, his eyes narrowing when he cupped my face and caressed my cheekbone with his calloused thumb. “You’re shaking,” he murmured, the space between his eyebrows crumpling up with concern.

“I’m okay.” I kissed the fleshy part of his palm and grinned at him as the earthquake inside me ebbed. “I’ve never gone supernova before. It was awesome.”

Len smiled back, one corner of his mouth unfurling softly as the worry bled out of him, and kissed my forehead before he rose smoothly to his feet.

Ray picked up the file and flipped through it. “Valentina Vostok,” he read, “graduated top of her physics program and then just dropped out of academia.”

Martin glanced at Rip and Ray in turn. “To help develop Savage’s new weapon, no doubt.”

“Ms. Vostok is his lynchpin,” Ray deduced before Rip snatched the file out of his hands.

Valentina Vostok41—was a Soviet cosmonaut in the comics who became radioactive and defected to the United States after she decided to become a superhero and joined the Doom Patrol. Later, she took the position of White Queen in Checkmate and died in the pre-reboot continuity,42 but she was alive post-reboot as a member of the Doom Patrol in the New-52.43 I knew about this version of her from talking to Joshua in the present, who’d met Valentina when he was an exchange student in St. Petersburg and had wanted to marry her before one of the temporal anomalies Saf created spat him out in present day Central City.

“I say we put two in the back of her head and call it a day,” Len suggested.

Ray heaved a quiet sigh. “We have no idea who this woman is or what her effect may be on history,” he argued. “She may be the next Madame Curie, for all we know.”

“She’s working for Savage,” Len snarked back. “That’s all we need to know.”

“She probably has no idea who’s backing her research,” Ray pointed out. “Just let me approach her as a scientist and we’ll see what she knows about Savage’s weapons program.”

Len folded his arms. “It’s 1986, you’re American, and you don’t speak Russian. She’ll have you pegged as a spy in a second.”

“Perhaps I can help with that.” Rip fetched a black box from the captain’s quarters and brought it to the table.

“Babel fish?” I perked up at the possibility. “This is where God with a capital G vanishes in a puff of logic, isn’t it?”

“‘Meanwhile,’” Ray quoted with a grin, “‘the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different cultures and races, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.’”44

I giggled. I couldn’t help it! I loved that story, especially the part about the Babel fish, but then Rip opened the box and I saw that it was pills. I was a little bit disappointed by the absence of a yellow, leechlike creature. Oh well.

“Ingestible translators,” Rip explained, “they attach to your larynx via neural interface. Swallow them and you can speak and understand any language spoken to you.”

Len and Ray each swallowed one of the green capsules while I wondered how that concept made any sense. How exactly did a pill access the language center of the brain from the larynx? I had to tell myself that I was in the land of comic book science, and it didn’t have to make any sense to work.

“How do you turn it on?” Martin asked.

“Hey,” I booped Len with my foot, “quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?”

That was _how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood_ in Latin. Yeah.

Len chuckled once, softly. “Te amo,” he told me.

I didn’t need to take a pill to know he’d said _I love you_. “Te quoque amo,” I said. That was _I love you, too_.

I didn’t speak Russian and I hadn’t taken a pill, so I got lost in lack of translation after we quit flirting in a dead language and they slipped into something more Slavic and less romance. Apparently the translators could somehow trick the brain into thinking English was being spoken when in fact it was using another language.

Ray actually pouted when Gideon switched them back into English. I smiled at how much fun he was having. It was adorable, okay? Don’t judge me.

“According to Vostok’s file she’s a big fan of the ballet,” Rip explained after the language shenanigans had fizzled out, “she has box seats at the Bolshoi and attends every performance.”

“It seems the final performance of _Le Roi Candaule_ is today,” Gideon informed us.

“Oh!” I might’ve squealed a little bit. “ _Le Roi Candaule_ is based on part of the first book in the _Histories_ of Herodotus,” I elaborated when Len gave me a curious look over his shoulder. “It’s about Candaules, the king of Lydia, and Nisia, his queen. Candaules fucks up when he says his queen is more beautiful than Venus, who fucks him and his kingdom over for saying a mortal is superior to a goddess.”

“Dr. Palmer,” Rip handed over the file to Ray, “you will engage Ms. Vostok at the ballet, while you, Mr. Snart, you’re going to be his wingman.”

“Oй,” Len deadpanned.

I might’ve squealed a lot at what I hoped was another _Top Gun_ reference. Don’t judge me. It was hilarious at the time…and given what happened after this, I needed all of the laughter I could get.

Ray smiled when took the file. I figured he was excited for a covert op that meant he got to wear a suit. “Better go bone up on Vostok, сразу.”

“I guess I’ll bone up on the ballet.” Len unfolded his arms to press his palms flat against the table. “Gideon,” he said in his smoothest voice, “bone me.”

* * *

Rip made Ray wait to approach our target until the intermission, so nobody on this covert op got to actually go inside the Bolshoi Theater. I’ll admit I was disappointed. I’d wanted a night at the ballet. I figured I’d watch the performance while Ray pulled a honeytrap scheme on Valentina and Len played the seduction game as his wingman, the Iceman to his Maverick. That’s not what happened.

Valentina emerged from the theater in a red dress with nothing but jewels and a black clutch purse, no jacket or wrap despite the cold outside.

“I got eyes on Vostok,” Len told Ray, “she’s headed straight for you, Loverboy.”

I rolled my eyes at him. “Rude,” I huffed without heat.

Len smirked and that was enough to make heat coil through me, curling like a wire pulled taut between my thighs until I ached sweetly. That was inconvenient as fuck.

“Alright,” said Rip from where he was running mission control aboard the Waverider, “everything’s looking good from my end. Proceed.”

Valentina had a cigarette in hand. Ray flamed out when he offered her a light. I leaned into Len to bury a giggle in the sleeve of his faux fur coat. Totally worse than his parka in a fashionable sense, but he looked good in anything.

Len smirked wider and walked over to Ray. “Damn,” he gloated, “that was cold, even by Russian standards.”

That’s when Gideon detected a temporal anomaly. Rip left the ship and brought Mick along to take out Chronos. Len suggested he take a crack at her, since Ray struck out, which hurt more than I expected. Valentina was gorgeous, with her artfully pinned dark curls and pale blue eyes and that red dress. I knew how I looked next to her. Hell, I knew how I looked next to _him_. Mismatched.

Len went to intervene when Ray namedropped Svarog and showed his hand too soon. “Sorry,” he said as he moved to stand beside Valentina, but not too close. “Is this man bothering you?” he asked.

“Don’t trouble yourself,” Valentina told him as they walked away together, “I’m not a damsel in distress.”

“Good,” Len said in his smoothest voice, “‘cause I’m not a white knight.”

Valentina gave him a coy glance when the bells chimed. “Seems intermission is over.”

“Well,” Len smirked at her then, “you wouldn’t want to miss Queen Nisia dancing naked with the nymphs.”

Valentina smiled. “My favorite part of the ballet,” she told him, “but I’ve seen it so many times. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind walking me home instead.”

Len offered his elbow to her in a gesture that was incongruously gallant for someone who claimed he wasn’t a knight, and Valentina took it.

Jealousy spooled in my gut like noodles on the tines of a fork, visceral and nauseating. I noticed then she actually stood an inch above him in her stiletto heels, but without the shoes they’d be well matched in height. It wouldn’t be awkward for him to use the missionary position with her. Hell, they’d be able to make eye contact the whole time, which he loved during sex. Valentina was probably more experienced than me—pretty much everyone was, though—and he was attracted to her. I could tell. Not that he would’ve acted on his attraction to anyone else if the fate of the world hadn’t been at stake here, but that didn’t change how ugly I felt inside.

Ray looked like I felt, his face falling as he stuffed his hands into the pockets of his tuxedo pants. I shuffled over and tucked my cane in the crook of my elbow before I tugged on the cuff of his sleeve. “Cold?” I asked softly.

“Yeah,” Ray nodded, “my hands are freezing. Should’ve fabricated gloves.”

“Probably,” I retorted before I gently extracted one of his hands from his pocket. I held it up in both of mine and exhaled soft puffs of warm air over his fingers.

Ray sighed happily and gave me his other hand in the aftermath. “How’re you so warm?” he asked.

“I’m fat,” I deadpanned.

“Don’t say that,” Ray squeezed my fingers, “you’re not—”

I held up one hand to stop him. “I am,” I told him softly. “There’s an ugly connotation associated with the word, so people who like me hesitate to call me fat, but I am. That doesn’t mean I’m not also intelligent and funny and powerful. ‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’”

“‘I celebrate myself, and sing myself,’” Ray quoted back to me with a crooked smile, “‘and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.’”

“‘I exist as I am,’” I smiled back at him as I spoke, “‘that is enough. If no other in the world be aware I sit content, and if each and all be aware I sit content. One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself.’ I’m faking it until I make it,” I whispered conspiratorially, “it’s difficult to love myself sometimes, but I have to try.”45

“Doesn’t seem all that difficult.” Ray fell into step beside me when I shuffled after our target and my husband once I figured they’d gone far enough that she wouldn’t notice our frozen pursuit. “I’ve only known you for a few days, but talking to you has been one of the best parts of this adventure.”

I smiled, but I didn’t show him my slightly crooked teeth. Not with how insecure I was feeling. “What’s difficult is watching them.” I flailed the hand I wasn’t using to grip my cane at Valentina. “Don’t they look good together? It’s _lovely_ ,” I spat the word out with a bitter huff, “a lovely romantic evening for a couple of pretty, able-bodied people. It’s like a scene out of a movie, or a show on the CW, where only conventionally attractive people get to exist…” I sighed, “…where I don’t get to exist. That’s what he could have instead of,” I flailed my hand at myself, “y’know, this. I’m not completely unfortunate looking, but she’s drop dead gorgeous. I have no idea why he’s with me.”46

“Are you sure you don’t want your coat back?” I heard Valentina ask over the radio in my ear, “I can’t believe that you’re not freezing.”

“Oh,” Len said in his smoothest voice, “I _love_ the cold.”

That’s when I realized Len must’ve heard everything I’d said. I felt my stomach go _kerplunk_ , sinking until it left my body to settle somewhere in the vicinity of the Moscowian sewer system. I felt uglier than before. I hadn’t known that was possible.

“So what is it about the ballet that you love, Valentina?” Len asked in a low voice equal parts intimate and curious. That was good, making it all about her passion. Ray made the same approach, but he’d used science, which had been super ineffective. Apparently she didn’t love her work, not like she loved the ballet.

I couldn’t see Valentina, but I could hear the smile in her voice when she spoke. “It’s the combination of grace and strength,” she told him, “pushing the body to its breaking point. It’s a thing of beauty.”

“I have no idea why you’re with him if that’s how he makes you feel,” Ray told me.

I shook my head slowly. “It’s not,” I whispered. “Len tells me how pretty he thinks I am, how sexy. I know he means it, but I don’t believe it. That’s my problem. It was my problem before I was with him,” I sighed, “falling in love didn’t make my insecurities go away. That’s all.”

That’s when Valentina stopped to point at a beautiful Byzantine-style building. “My apartment…” she smiled wide and warm as she moved to face my husband, “…you know, this time of night it’s colder than a Siberian winter.”

“Sounds perfect,” Len said in that low intimate voice.

“Though I’m sure we could heat it up,” Valentina told him.

“Sadly,” Len tilted his head to give her what I assumed was a regretful look, “I have business elsewhere this evening.”

“Well,” Valentina peeled his coat off slowly to reveal her bare shoulders and moved closer to give it back, “if this is goodbye…”

Len folded it over his forearm and held the umbrella in his other hand. Then she kissed him. Len just let it happen. I was pretty sure he kissed her back, too. It wasn’t a particularly long lip lock, since he’d rejected her offer to heat things up, but he didn’t stop her from lingering a little bit. Valentina was smiling again when she broke the kiss and took the umbrella he’d stolen from the theatre with her when she walked away.

I knew it was for the mission, but it still hurt to watch him kiss someone else. I couldn’t look at him. I didn’t want him to see me.

“You enjoy the show, Raymond?” Len asked. That was his way of telling me that it was all for show and taking the opportunity to gloat over how he’d won where Ray lost simultaneously.

I exhaled a soft whoosh of air. “You’re an asshole,” I told him without making eye contact.

“Yeah,” Len retorted after he wiped the smudge of her lipstick away, the smugness in his voice edged with insecurity that was equal and opposite to mine. “You love me.”

Ray stuffed his hands in his pockets and stepped out from behind the statue. “I think I’ve got frostbite in some not so fun places from waiting out here,” he said. “Did she tell you what kind of weapon Savage is building?”

Len shrugged. “Didn’t come up,” he snarked back.

“So,” Ray exhaled a petulant huff, “other than infidelity and a possible case of hypothermia, we’ve got nothing.”

“I wouldn’t say that.” Len extracted a stolen keycard from a pocket inside the lining of his tuxedo jacket. “It’s Vostok’s security badge for a place called Luskavic Labs. Whatever weapon she’s building for Savage, we’ll find it there.”

“I guess I should just be happy you didn’t swipe her wallet,” Ray muttered.

Len extracted a small red wallet from the pocket of his coat and showed it off with a smirk. “I’m a thief,” he told Ray, “and that was just me pulling a job. It wasn’t infidelity,” he closed the distance between us and cupped my face in both hands so I was forced to meet his eyes. “I love you,” he said with slow vehemence. “I don’t want anyone else. Not if having them means losing you. No matter who else I’m attracted to, I’m always thinking about you. I was thinking about you this whole time.”

“Wait,” Ray stretched the long _a_ sound out into awkward territory. “Were you serious when you asked if I was up for a threesome?”

“Nah,” Len deadpanned, “you’re demi too. I knew you wouldn’t go for it, and neither would Mac. I just really like making her blush,” he smiled when my cheeks flushed hot under his palms and caressed my cheekbones with his thumbs. “It’s cute.”

* * *

Sara and Kendra were the only people on the Waverider when we returned to the ship. Rip had gone to meet his mentor with Firestorm and Mick as backup, while Mark and Shawna were nowhere aboard. I went to change out of the formalwear I’d fabricated while Len and Ray waited for everyone to get back in command central. Martin was yelling at Jax when I finished slipping into something more comfortable. I heard him from the hallway and backed away slowly, not wanting to get involved. Len had the same thought, apparently, because he walked out of command central and into the hallway to find me there.

“Jax is hurt and Mardon and Baez aren’t on board,” Len told me once we were alone in our room, “the captain doesn’t know where they are or what he’s doing.”

I figured Mark and Shawna had left to do whatever he’d come aboard to do. “Jax is going to be okay,” I said, “isn’t he?”

Len cocked his head. “Only if the professor stops yelling at him so he can go to the med bay and get checked out.”

I heaved a sigh and shifted my weight off my ankle. “What a hot mess today has been,” I said.

“Yeah,” Len gave me that filthy smirk I loved, “but I plan to show you how sexy you are after we break into Luskavic Labs and steal the weapon from Savage. That’s a promise.”

I made shooing gesticulations at him until he sat on the bed and looked up at me. I propped my cane against the mattress and knelt between his legs. “Tell me now,” I said as I unbuttoned his pants. “Tell me how sexy you think I am.”

Len clenched his teeth around a sharp intake of air when I tugged down the waistband of his underwear and wrapped one hand around his half-hard cock. “I think you’re gorgeous,” he told me fervently as I kissed the head of him. “It’s not just the way you look,” he moaned and started to babble while I kissed and licked and sucked up and down his shaft. “It’s who you are. How you make bad puns and mince your words. How you’re the worst liar I’ve ever met. How you squeak when you laugh too hard. How your brain goes faster than any speedster could ever run. How I’m the only man who’s ever tasted you, who’s been all the way inside of you. How you’re using your tongue right now—”

That’s when I wrapped my lips around his cock and sucked, hard. Len grabbed my hair with both hands and thrust himself all the way inside my mouth as I swallowed his precome. I whimpered after the head of him bumped into the back of my throat, my gag reflex fluttering while I sucked him harder. Len growled, the sound raw and low in his throat, and said my name. I swallowed when he came, all of it but a thick line dripping from one corner of my lips. I licked that up once he slipped out.

“I think you’re the most beautiful woman in the world,” Len smiled and bared his teeth, “in any world. I love you.”

Then he cradled the back of my head and gave me a kiss so sweet my heart clenched horribly in my chest. I whimpered again, one hand on his knee while I curled the fingers of the other against his waist through his shirt. I couldn’t taste her lipstick, or any lingering evidence that he’d kissed anybody else but me that day. I could only taste _him_ , a bittersweet mingling of his come and his lips. I felt how much he loved me there in the slant of his mouth on mine.

It really was in his kiss.47

* * *

After we landed near the laboratory, Martin left the ship alone on what he assumed was a simple reconnaissance mission. I shuffled into command central with Len in time to overhear him saying: “Operation Svarog…Slavic god of fire, of course…he and Vostok are building Soviet Firestorm.”

Hell, we really were going to end up retroactively causing the Chernobyl disaster. “Oh crap,” I blurted.

“They’ve already built the thermal core,” Martin said in a voice tinted with rueful awe. I figured the professor was a little bit impressed that scientists from thirty years ago managed to duplicate his work in retrospect.

Len and I went to find Ray before we went to break into the laboratory. It wasn’t a reconnaissance mission now. It was an extraction contingency, which Martin should’ve realized he might need. What a hot mess—so hot it was literally thermonuclear.

It took us a few minutes to get inside, all told. I located the control room by simultaneously accessing the rendering of the laboratory Gideon had generated for Rip and closed circuit camera feeds in the building. There were two armed men inside the room. I held up two fingers while my other hand gripped the handle of my cane.

“I need someone to take the core offline so I can remove it safely and shield it,” Martin explained.

“I’m all over it, professor.” Ray hadn’t put on his exosuit, so I ended up zapping one of the armed men while my husband dealt with the other man using brute force.

“We’re all over it,” Len snarked back.

Martin kept talking over the radio. “Remember, Dr. Palmer, that shutting down the core incorrectly can lead to the creation of—”

“Strangelets, black holes, and uncontrolled fusion reactions that consume the universe?” Ray postulated. “See, I was listening during class, professor.”

“It’s quantum mechanics,” I explained to Len, “strangelets are hypothetical particles with equal numbers of down, up, and strange quarks. I think the professor is worried about colliding ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, which in turn might create strangelets. If a macroscopic strangelet—a quark star—could gain subplanetary mass, theoretically one could puncture the planet. It’s all theoretical at this point, but since we live in the land of comic book science, they might not be as theoretical as we think.”

“Indeed, Mrs. Snart.” Martin wheezed a little bit when he opened the door to the fallout shelter that contained the thermal core. It didn’t quite mask how surprised he was that I knew about the strange matter hypothesis.

“I read the paper you wrote on extreme-energy cosmic rays,” I told him. “I liked your theory about the centrifugal mechanism of acceleration in the magnetospheres of active galactic nuclei as a point of potential origin for Zevatrons.”

Of course his theory about that had unraveled once new research showed that less than forty percent of cosmic rays originated from active galactic nuclei. I still thought it was interesting, though.

“How we doing, Boy Scout?” Len asked Ray.

“Uh,” Ray looked over his shoulder and gave Len a proud grin, “point of fact: I completed all twenty-one merit badges, including nuclear science,” his grin turned goofy when he looked at me and clarified, “so I’m an Eagle Scout.” That’s when he looked up and noticed Valentina walking toward the fallout shelter. “Uh oh,” he said, “we got a problem. Valentina’s headed toward the core containment unit, the radiation Stein’s about to unleash, if she opens the door—”

“We’re here to stop Savage from building a nuclear powered superhero,” Len pointed out in the most exasperated tone I’d ever heard come out of his mouth, “saving some commie broad ain’t on the agenda.”

Ray quit shutting down the core to argue with my husband. “Even if the radiation doesn’t kill her,” he retorted, “Savage will the second he finds out the lab has been sabotaged. Look, we’ve got to get her out of here.”

I huffed because I had no idea how to work the machine to shut the core off myself and exhaled with enough force to flap my lips. I wasn’t a fan of the Arrowverse version of Valentina, but I didn’t want her dead. Although if I had to choose between her and the future, I wouldn’t hesitate. I was neither a goddess nor merciful.

“Who’s going to shut down the core, Raymond?” Len snarked back. “I skipped that merit badge.”

“Raymond,” Martin interjected over the radio, “why is the thermal core still running at full power?”

“Good question,” I muttered. “It’s because Ray talks with his hands and he has a bleeding heart.”

“I’ll handle the core,” Ray said, “you guys handle Valentina.”

“So you’re willing to risk the mission for a woman you barely know,” Len said incredulously.

“Be helpful to others,” Ray told Len softly. “It’s the Scout motto.”

Len shoved Ray back down into the chair. “Thirty seconds,” he snarled, “we’ll get Vostok, you kill the power for Stein, and Raymond?” he held up one finger and pointed at him in warning, “promise me.”

Ray nodded, his lips folding into a thin resolute line.

I shuffled out along the walkway and I was a hater so I went to the left, to the left.48 Len went in the opposite direction so we’d be coming at her from either side. Unfortunately he moved faster than I could with my bad ankle, and he got to her first.

“Bad idea,” Len told her with a thread of frustration in his smooth voice.

“What are you doing here?” Valentina asked. I was too far away to hear her speak any way but over the radio, because I wasn’t six-foot-two or able-bodied enough to walk faster. Ugh.

“Believe me,” Len eyed me over her shoulder, “I’ve been asking myself the same question.”

“Last night at the Bolshoi,” Valentina said, “it was you who stole my keys.”

Len cocked his head in concession. “And your wallet,” he told her, “but it was nothing personal.”

That’s when Valentina noticed Martin was inside the fallout shelter. “What is that man doing?” she asked, her voice pitching frantically higher. “He has no idea what the core is capable of.”

“Relax,” Len murmured while he moved to put himself in between her and the containment area. “He’s the one who invented it.”

“You used me,” Valentina deduced. “You work for American government.”

“I’m wanted by the American government,” Len deadpanned. “Does that count?”

Valentina somehow managed to snort delicately as she turned back to look at Martin. I ducked out of sight because I didn’t want to lose the element of surprise. I should’ve zapped her unconscious so Len could princess carry her to safety, but I wanted the opposite of that.

“Look,” Len heaved a sigh. “I may be your white knight just this once. That weapon Savage has you building? He’s creating a nuclear powered monster.”

That’s when Valentina pointed a gun at my husband. “I know,” she told him as she took his cold gun away. “It was sweet of you to think of me as a damsel in distress,” she dropped the cold gun on the walkway behind her, “but I’m not the one who needs rescuing.”

I debated paramagnetizing it into my hands and shooting her. I didn’t trust my instincts. Not with how insecure she made me feel. Which made me doubt myself. Which in turn got me into a terribad GULAG situation, but more on that later.

“Don’t flatter yourself, sweetheart.” Len said in calmest, deadliest voice. I knew in that moment he wanted her dead too. That was good enough for me. “I’m not the sentimental type.”

“No,” Valentina agreed, “but your partner—the physicist with the big brown eyes—is. Turn the core back online,” she told Ray over the radio. “Turn it back on or I will put a bullet in your friend’s head.”

That’s when I had a panic attack, my first in months. I couldn’t breathe, my own heartbeat was louder than anything else, but I could hear everything over the radio like our frequency was broadcasting at maximum volume. In hindsight, my powers were escalating—a radio wave, after all, was a type of electromagnetic radiation—but I couldn’t process the wavelengths and I had no idea why. It was disorienting and horrific, creating a cacophonous feedback loop inside my head.

“Don’t you dare,” Len told Ray, “she’s going to shoot me whether you do it or not.”

“That may be true,” Valentina said, “and you can take that gamble if you like. It’s only his life you wager.”

“I’m not joking, Raymond.” Len said with slow vehemence. “Don’t you dare push that button.”

Ray pushed the button. It was a big damn heroic move.49 It was also the worst possible outcome.

“Raymond, what’s going on?” Martin asked in the aftermath, “the core just went back online.”

“Sorry, professor.” Ray shook off a surge of guilt. “I had to do it.”

“You _idiot_ ,” Len growled and bit down on the consonant at the end.

“I can still remove it,” Martin told us over the radio, “I just hope I can absorb the excess power.”

“No!” Ray shouted. “Do you have any idea the kind of energy—”

That’s when the _thump_ of his body hitting the console and then the floor jolted me out of the unreality I was trapped in during my panic attack. I didn’t bother to pick up the cold gun. I shuffled onto the main walkway and paramagnetized her pistol until it looked like she’d changed her mind and decided to shoot herself in the head instead.

“Don’t touch my husband,” I told her.

Martin was screaming over the radio when I paramagnetized the pistol to the wall. Valentina was yanked back along with the weapon and upon impact, her skull made a satisfying _thunk_. I watched her crumple to the floor and let her pistol drop to join her there. Len moved to see whether Martin had made it out of the fallout shelter, only to find him being captured by six armed men.

Valentina was pointing her pistol at him again when I turned back around. “Mr. Savage would very much like to meet you and the rest of your friends,” she told us.

Len smirked when he noticed Mick was coming up behind her. Apparently our backup was finally here. About time. “Be careful what you wish for,” he said.

Mick shot a burst of flame that made Valentina duck into the space haunted by the panic attack I’d had moments before. Len grabbed his cold gun while the armed men came at us from all sides. I changed the trajectory of a bullet aimed at Mick, but I wasn’t fast enough to keep it from grazing his upper arm so deeply that he dropped the heat gun. I figured he would laugh about our matching wounds later.

“Do not let Vostok leave with that thermal core!” Rip yawped over the radio.

“Get the hell out of here!” Mick yelled at Len. “What are you waiting for?”

Len spun to look at me, his nostrils flaring, his mouth flatlined and his jaw clenched tight. I knew he didn’t want to leave either of his partners behind. Not even to save the world.

“I’ve got this,” I told him. “Go.”

Len nodded and holstered his cold gun before he jumped over the railing and rappelled down a few lengths of chain to grab the thermal core. I generated a wad of lightning in one hand and shuffled over to zap all the armed men it had taken to keep Mick from his weapon.

That’s when Valentina hit me over the head and knocked me out. I woke up locked in a prison cell. Mick and Ray were nowhere to be seen and my cell had walls instead of bars, so I assumed I was in solitary confinement. I wondered if they’d separated us because I was a woman and they were both men, or because I had superpowers and they didn’t. That question was answered when I noticed there were insulated gloves secured to my hands with inverted spike bracelets that dug into my forearms near the elbow.

I exhaled a quiet huff of laughter and generated enough breakdown voltage to tear the gloves apart on the atomic level before I peeled the metal away. It _hurt_ —I was actually in a significant amount of pain between my arthritic joints, the bullet graze, the bruise on my thigh, multiple puncture wounds on both forearms, and what was probably a mild concussion—but that didn’t stop me. Luckily the blow to the head didn’t leave much of a mark. There was no blood when I felt my parietal bone through my hair and scalp, just a tender patch up near my coronal suture.

That’s when I heard Len saying, “Where was my backup, Captain?” in that condescending tone. “Half the team is gone,” he was using his calmest voice and that meant he was trying not to lose his cool, “because of _you_.”

“And if I’d sent the other half in to save them they would be captured too,” Rip said. “And where would we be? Savage would have both halves of Firestorm, a dead Kendra on top of a dead Carter…everything he wants. It would be the end to our little crusade. And most likely the world, so before you pull that trigger, ask yourself: what would you have done?”

Len exhaled in a harsh puff of sound. “That is pretty a cold calculation, Rip. Almost criminal,” he rose and until then I didn’t know he’d been sitting in a chair, “except we criminals have a code: you never leave one of your own behind. I didn’t just leave my partner,” he raised his voice and shouted, “I left my _wife_ in the hands of that immortal psychopath because of _you_.”

I’d never heard him raise his voice until that moment. Len didn’t shout unless he was giving his partner orders Mick wasn’t following, and he’d certainly never raised his voice to me or anyone else who mattered to him outside of that context. It hurt worse than every injury I’d sustained in the days since we boarded the Waverider to know he was so upset that he’d shouted.

“We will get them back,” Rip told him. It sounded hollow, but then I didn’t like Rip enough to give our hapless futuristic captain the benefit of the doubt.

That’s when Len shifted his focus to ask, “Where were you?”

I had no idea who he was talking to until I heard Shawna answer, “Central City.”

Here’s the thing: Mark was five years old in 1986. Clyde was three. Shawna had taken Mark to Central City because he wanted a do-over with his brother. Only after they got there he decided not to deprive his younger self of twenty-seven years with his brother. Mark was a very impulsive person, and he hadn’t thought his plan through past saving Clyde, so the repercussions hadn’t occurred to him until he got there and decided not to act on his impulse after all.

Len couldn’t be mad at Mark for wanting to save his sibling. Captain Cold shot Chillblaine after he murdered Golden Glider in the comics,50 not unlike how Mark had wanted to avenge Clyde by killing Iris in front of Joe.51 Len in the comics had avenged his sister by killing her murderer, while Mark wanted the man who murdered his brother to hurt the same way that he was hurting. It was also heavily implied that Weather Wizard killed his brother in the comics, but that was neither here nor there.

That’s when the heavy door to my cell opened and Valentina stepped inside along with Mikhail Arkadin.52 I contorted the metal on the floor that had been gouging my forearms when I woke up so it was pinning them to the wall by their throats. I took the rifle Arkadin had on him, paramagnetized it, and pressed the barrel against his forehead underneath the brim of his peaked cap.

“Where are my friends?” I asked.

Arkadin spat something that was probably rude, but he couldn’t move his neck, so the spittle ended up all over his chin while he said something else.

“I don’t speak Russian,” I retorted, “sorry not sorry.”

“What are you?” Valentina wanted to know.

“I’m a goddess,” I deadpanned.

That’s when I heard applause from the doorway. Savage was standing there in his coat full of knives, giving me a slow clap. I knew he was the big bad. Hell, he’d murdered Carter and Kendra two hundred times, he wanted to rule the world, and if our mission failed then he’d conquer the planet a hundred and eighty years from now…but I was so underwhelmed by him it was embarrassing. Savage had been on this earth for a sizeable chunk of human history and what did he have to show for it? Wealth, of course, and a blood cult of people who wanted to live forever, but that was it. After four thousand years, that wasn’t much. There were people who’d gotten more shit done in four years than Savage had accomplished in four millennia. Obviously he was an immortal man with terribad time management skills.

“I remember you,” Savage told me, “you’re the one who stole the power from my knife…” he drew the dagger in question, the sacred one Carter had given Kendra when they were Chay-Ara and Khufu, “…I’m very interested to know how you did it, you know…in all my long years I’ve never met anything quite like you before.”

“I’m not a _thing_ ,” I retorted and stopped his heart in his chest.

Valentina snorted and choked on her laughter in her efforts to keep the inverted spikes from puncturing her carotid arteries. “He can’t die,” she told me smugly. “He is immortal.”

I shrugged and paramagnetized the dagger and quietly took it from where he’d put it back under his coat out of their line of sight. “I know he won’t stay dead,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean I can’t kill him.”

I let them go after that so they could take Savage elsewhere. I kept the rifle, though, so they’d focus on that weapon instead of the dagger I’d stolen.

I might’ve ugly cried a little bit after they were gone. I guess I was overwhelmed, after all.

* * *

It took me an embarrassingly long time to deduce that I’d tuned into the radio frequency we used to communicate with Rip or whoever was aboard the Waverider during missions. That’s how I heard everything being said in the captain’s quarters and command central. I just had to figure out whether or not I could transmit back to the ship, too.

Anyhow.

It had been the sort of day that passed as slowly as the gravitational pull on molasses when I overheard Gideon say: “Labor Camp #54, formerly known as the кошмар or Nightmare GULAG, built in the eighteenth century—”

“Can we skip past the Wikipedia crap and get to the good stuff?” Len asked. “Like how to break in.”

I recognized the name of the prison from the time Oliver, Diggle, and Felicity broke Lyla Michaels and Floyd Lawton out of кошмар. That meant we were still in Moscow.

“Perhaps you didn’t register that as a question, Gideon?” Sara prompted.

“I understood,” xe told her, “but in its two hundred years of operation no one has successfully escaped—”

“No offense, Gideon…” Len said in his smoothest voice, “but I never met a building I couldn’t break into.”

I eavesdropped while they formulated a plan, the first step of which was asking the Bratva to help orchestrate a breakout. I knew the Soviet goons couldn’t intercept what I was receiving from the ship, because our communications were scrambled with futuristic sequencing technology. Gideon had tried to explain it to me, but I knew nothing about how radiotelephony worked.

I could’ve escaped my cell by using my powers to unlock the door, but I couldn’t leave Mick, or Ray, or Martin. I couldn’t do much of anything. I wasn’t physically capable of running, but there was nowhere to run anyway. I had to wait for my husband to rescue me like a princess in a fucking tower.

Ugh.

* * *

“Now,” said Rip. “According to Yuri, this is where his men have access, got it?”

“This isn’t my first prison break,” Len deadpanned.

I giggled. I couldn’t help it! I was thinking about _Prison Break_.

“It’s not mine either,” Shawna pointed out, “or his.”

“Yeah,” said Mark. “We got this.”

Shawna had broken her ex-boyfriend Clay out of jail and Mark had broken my husband out of Iron Heights. Approximately half the people left on the ship had successfully broken someone out of prison. Hell, if Team Arrow and A. R. G. U. S. could do it in 2013, we could do it in 1986. I didn’t trust Rip as far as I could’ve thrown him—which, with my disability, was about a millimeter—but I trusted my husband and my friends. That was good enough for me.

“We got it covered,” Sara told Rip.

“So,” Kendra said, “how can we help?”

“By staying on the ship,” Rip told her, “we don’t need any more casualties. Besides, they’ve got it covered.”

“Whoa, man.” Jax protested. “Why does it feel like we’re on the JV team all of a sudden?”

“What you are is one half of everything Savage needs to change the face of the Cold War,” Rip told him before he turned to Kendra, “and you are the only person who can kill him.”

“Yeah,” Kendra said. “So you can’t just—”

“I am not going to giftwrap the two people in the world that Savage wants the most!” Rip yelled at her.

“We should get going,” Len muttered with a thread of exasperation.

“Oh, Ms. Lance,” said Rip, “could I borrow you for a moment? I have something that might help you out with the mission.”

“So what’d you really want to talk to me about?” Sara asked once they were stowed away in the captain’s quarters.

I didn’t realize Mark was there too until Rip said: “Gideon, would you please show Ms. Lance and Mr. Mardon the projection of 2016 should our rescue mission fail?”

“I would be happy to, Captain,” xe said.

That’s when I saw that our possible future held scorched earth and a sky full of Soviet Firestorms. Nothing good. I had no idea how I was tuned into the projection system on board the Waverider, but apparently my powers were escalating again.

“So this is what happens to Russia if we don’t get the professor back,” said Mark.

“No,” Sara told him after she recognized a landmark in the dystopian horror show we were seeing, “this is what happens to Star City.”

“Yes,” said Rip, “and the rest of the world isn’t much better.”

“That’s impossible,” Sara insisted.

“Not if Stein creates a stable Firestorm for the Soviets,” Rip explained, “in 1986 they’re already perilously close to creating a prototype. Listen to me,” his voice pitched higher in distress, “everything, _everything_ , we have tried to achieve so far could be lost, and not only will my family die a hundred and eighty years from now, but your families, your cities, your entire twenty-first century world will suffer.”

“That’s why we’re going to get Stein back,” Sara told him, “before Vostok can break him.”

“I hope you’re right,” said Rip, “but we need a contingency plan.”

Mark snickered, the sound a harsh cut that split the heavy air like a gust of wind. “I can do that,” he said. “I won’t let my son grow up in that world.”

“What are you saying?” Sara asked.

“I’m saying that if at any point throughout the operation it becomes clear that Martin is beyond our reach…” Rip swallowed thickly.

I knew he wanted them to kill Martin to save the future if they had to. Hell, after seeing that forecast of the future I figured it was a good contingency plan to have.

That’s when someone put a tray of food through the slot in the door to my cell: bread, some kind of bean soup, and water. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have eaten it, but I was hypoglycemic and I was hungry. Apparently they’d drugged the food, because I passed out on the bed and woke up tied to a chair between Mick and Ray, both of whom had been chained shirtless to the ceiling.

At least nobody had undressed me. Savage had lowkey threatened to rape Kendra multiple times, but nobody had threatened me with sexual violence yet. What a novelty in the land of comic book stories, in which rape and sexual assault were constantly used as plot devices. I felt blessed even surrounded by instruments of torture.

Here’s the thing: sarcasm aside, I was terrified. There was no way I could protect everyone. I figured Martin was behind the two-way glass with Savage—because this was being staged like a show and that meant somebody was watching—but I didn’t know for sure.

Mick and Ray were hooked up to electrodes, which were in turn hooked up to machines that generated electric currents. That, I could stop. There was iron in every torture instrument. Those, I could magnetize. Savage had made a mistake when he brought me here: he’d seen exactly what I could do with a small amount of metal, and he’d given me a roomful of potential weapons. Not to mention the electricity in the walls and, y’know, the lightning that lived inside my body.

At this point I was just happy they hadn’t attached electrodes to my nipples, which was a thing Russian military forces had done to women in Chechnya on Earth-33. Not that it would’ve done any harm, but nobody here needed to know how much I liked electrostimulation.

Anyhow.

Arkadin sneered at me and turned a dial on one of the machines. Instead of electrocuting Ray or Mick, it generated a force that shredded my perception into tatters while I screamed. I was crying when he turned it down, and then he turned it back up even higher. I think he only turned it off because I overloaded the machine until it exploded, which I’d done on instinct. If popping my dislocated shoulder back in place by running into a stone wall was my ten on the pain scale, this was a fifteen or a twenty. I couldn’t _think_. I could only exhale wheezes and whimpers and broken words. I couldn’t process what I was saying. I only knew that I was speaking because my mouth was moving.

I was sobbing, too. That set Mick off, growling at Arkadin and gnashing his teeth.

“How sweet,” Arkadin said. “Is this блядь your woman, then?”

“She’s not my woman,” Mick snarled. “She’s my family. I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going all _Rocky IV_ on your ass. Ivan Drogo lives at the end of the movie—”

That’s when Arkadin turned the dial on the machine attached to the electrodes and generated a current with enough intensity to make them flop around like a marionette in the hands of a child. Mick screamed, Ray screamed, I screamed, we all screamed, and I made a mental note to take the team out for ice cream when we survived this.

“Aren’t they supposed to ask us some questions?” Ray wondered after he stopped convulsing.

“They don’t care what we’ve gotta say,” Mick huffed, “we’re just part of the show.”

Ray belatedly noticed the two-way glass then. “Stein?” he blurted, “professor, we’re okay, don’t tell these bastards anything—”

That’s when Arkadin turned the dial again. I felt the current and stopped it sluggishly, then disabled the machine with my brain. Arkadin glared at me and picked up a hammer from one of the instrument trays.

“When I get out of here…” Mick growled.

“That is a mistake,” Arkadin told him, “thinking you’ll get out of here.”

“Hey,” Ray said to him before he could strike Mick, “can I get some water in here, something to drink? I’m a little thirsty,” he grinned when Arkadin shifted his focus to him, “a sandwich would be nice,” he said, “a little turkey and mayo…do they have mayo in Russia?” he sighed when Arkadin didn’t answer. “At least in America you get a last meal,” he quipped, “communism really sucks.”

“What’re you doing, Boy Scout?” Mick asked.

“Yes, Boy Scout.” Arkadin said as he circled around me to stand behind Ray. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing compared to what I did to your mother last night,” Ray told him.

Arkadin decided it was hammer time after that.53 That’s how I learned Ray screamed louder when the blows were closer to his spine. I was bleeding from my nose and ears and I was still ugly crying, but I couldn’t just sit there and let him smash Ray with a hammer. I paramagnetized the hammer to the wall after the fifth and final blow. Ray could take it, but I couldn’t, and neither could Martin.

Ray passed out from the pain and so two soldiers had to carry him away. Mick didn’t fight when another pair led him out. Arkadin was preoccupied with him, so I generated heat lightning and burned the ropes off. I shuffled into the hall while I rubbed the welts that had risen up in an angry red around my wrists. I was limping more obviously than I did when I used my cane.

Len passed the hallway in time to see Arkadin punch Mick in the stomach, but that didn’t stop him. What stopped him cold was me. I must’ve looked awful with the welts and gouges and tears drying on my cheeks. I knew my hair was a mess because it had slithered in tangles over my face and shoulders. Len, though, was wearing an ushanka—a fuzzy Russian hat with ear flaps. I was about to laugh, or maybe cry again, when he started to move. I knew he hadn’t meant to move toward me, but he did. I shook my head. Len exhaled, his nostrils flaring, and his jaw clenched so hard it must’ve hurt before he walked away.

I knew the bodies on the gurney were Shawna and Sara. I had no idea where Mark was or why he wasn’t on the gurney, but it didn’t matter. I’d overheard their plan. I knew saving us would be futile if they didn’t get to Martin in time.

I was making sure the dagger was still underneath the mattress—I didn’t know how Savage hadn’t noticed I’d stolen it but at this point I didn’t care—when I overheard Jax telling Rip he needed to leave the ship and help Martin. That’s when I decided to save everyone the trouble and cut the power myself. I should’ve done it hours ago: no power, no way to track me transceiving.

I unlocked the door and shuffled out into the hallway. “Gideon,” I said, “I need to know where I am.”

“Yes, Mrs. Snart,” xe said before my eyes whited out. I could see myself on xyr screen and what was in front of me, the dark power grid and bright heat signatures, the thermal core powering up in the nuclear reactor. Mark was on the roof waiting in case someone had to shoot Martin to keep him from entering the reactor, Sara and Shawna were in one corner of the prison yard and Jax was in another, Kendra was rigging the basement to explode while Rip waited for Savage to show himself, and my husband was a few hundred feet away from me. Literally just around the corner.

I limped into the cell block and shaped a metal bar from one of the doors into a new cane. Mick was carrying an unconscious Ray on his shoulders and he was locking Arkadin in with one of the prisoners while Len watched at the other end of the hall. I held up one hand and flailed my arm to generate a dense magnetic field that swept the rioting prisoners and guards aside.

Len turned and looked over his shoulder. Then he saw me and said my name. That was enough to make me cry again. I was having a terribad day, okay? Don’t judge me. Len cradled the back of my head and pulled me against his chest. “What the hell happened?” he asked.

“They had some kind of machine,” Mick told him. “I don’t know what it was, but it hurt her pretty bad.”

“It was a transducer,” I said. “It converted the electricity inside me into torque, which applied force and changed the rotational kinetic energy of my body, which hurt. Basically,” I deadpanned, “they threw off my groove, but I got it back.”54

Len chuckled once, softly, and kissed me. There was blood, and sweat, and tears on my face, but apparently he didn’t care because he kept on kissing me until I gasped against his mouth. Then he nipped my bottom lip and tugged it between his teeth before he broke the kiss.

“I missed you,” I told him.

Len smiled, the corners of his mouth unfurling gently. “I missed you, too.”

Mick carried Ray through a door to the loading bay and onto the jump ship. Len went up onto the roof to keep Mark from shooting the professor before he joined us down in the prison yard. Jax tried to run across the prison yard to Martin, but his bad leg hurt too much along the way and Valentina merged with the professor into a new version of Firestorm.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh no.”

Len wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pointed the cold gun at her with his other hand.

“No!” Jax shouted over the riot. “Don’t shoot! Grey’s in there.”

Mark flailed to create a gust of wind that blew a cosmic fireball Valentina had thrown at us away. “I guess your princess is in another castle,” he snarked back.55

“Shawna,” I said, “teleport Mark to the jump ship and then come back for me. Jax needs to shift the merge from Valentina to himself. Sara, cover him from the left. Len, cover his right. Cool?”

“Cool,” Len said and hunched to kiss the crown of my head before he let me go.

I watched them shoot and baston their way through the riot to Valentina until Shawna touched my shoulder and teleported me away. Rip flew us all back to the Waverider as the Negative Woman had a nuclear meltdown and we flew off into hypertime after that to avoid the fallout. At least we hadn’t retroactively caused the Chernobyl disaster. That was good enough for me.

* * *

I returned from the med bay to find the rest of the team pouring shots of vodka my husband had stolen from the leader of the Russian mob.

“Courtesy of Yuri the Bear,” said Mick.

“How’d you even have time to steal this?” Sara asked.

Len smirked. “There’s always time to steal,” he told her smugly over the smooth line of his shoulder before he went to sit down.

I shuffled over to him and he pulled me onto his lap. I’d been through enough that day to not give a fuck about whether anyone was grossed out by our PDA. I snuggled as close to him as I could get with all of our clothes on and inhaled slowly instead. Len smelled like sweat, but underneath there was a more permanent scent: the sharp icy smell of his skin, the laundry soap I used at home, the faint lingering smell of me on him because he hadn’t showered or bathed at all since we’d had sex two nights ago.

I was shocked—pun unintended—that we’d gone two days without sex, actually. Len hadn’t let that happen since he was the one in jail. I fell asleep on his shoulder, cozy and safe. I woke up when he raised his shot glass and said, “to Rip, to things _not_ going according to his plan.”

“Okay,” I yawned, “speaking of things not going according to your plans. It’s time for my side mission. Gideon, set a course for Central City circa 2166.”

“Yes, Mrs. Snart,” xe said.

“Now hold on,” Rip objected, “you can’t just—”

“Yes I can,” I retorted, “you promised me I could save her.”

“Well,” Rip mumbled. “Yes, I did promise you that, but—”

“It’s been five days in linear time,” I said, “and in these past five days I’ve been shot, imprisoned, tortured, had a pregnancy scare, and I’ve almost died. I also saved the world and made at least one friend. I don’t want to abandon ship. I want you to keep the promise you made. That’s all.”

That’s when I lifted my skirt and drew the dagger I’d stolen from where I’d hidden it under the garters attached to my stockings. Nobody at the prison had made me change my clothes. I figured that was because they didn’t want to poke the sleeping fulgurkinetic lioness. I was married to a Leonard and I was a Leo because I was born on the last day of July. I was totally a lioness, but I digress. I held out the dagger and offered it up to our winged avenger. Kendra took it, clutching like I’d given back a part of her that she’d lost…or a tangible piece of Carter she could hold in her hands instead of him.

“Where did you get that?” Rip asked.

“Just be glad you didn’t blow up one of the only weapons that can kill Savage permanently when you dropped a bunch of bombs on him,” I retorted. “Gideon, are we staying my course?”

“Yes, Mrs. Snart,” xe told me.

“Thank you,” I told xyr. “I’m given Kendra the means to kill Savage, and we all have motive to make it happen, so Rip as team captain needs to give us the opportunity. Now that we have a plan, I’m going to take a nap,” I snuggled closer to my husband and muffled another yawn in the fabric of his jacket over his clavicle before I said, “wake me when the future ends.”

* * *

**Scene V**  
The Breaking of One Into the Manifold 

* * *

I woke up a hundred and eighty years in the future and a hundred and fifty years from the present day. I was in bed with my husband, and he was spooning me from behind. I blinked, squinted, and clawed the sleep from the corners of my eyes. It took me a few seconds to remember where I was and why I was here.

Len smoothed the hand he’d splayed over my belly to curl his fingers into my hip while he nuzzled my neck. I’d known he was up before that, because the cadence of his breath shifted in between waking and sleeping. I moaned when he nipped that particularly sensitive place behind my ear. There was nothing I wanted more in that moment than a round or two of lazy morning sex. I reached over my shoulder to cradle the back of his head and my fingers dug into the nape of his neck while he wrapped his other arm tighter around my waist and slipped his other hand under my skirt. “Good morning,” he murmured lowly into my ear as two of his fingertips teased me through the crotch of my panties.

“Good morning,” I whispered back and slowly ground myself against him. I was still aching from the assorted wounds I’d accumulated between 1975 and 1986, but I had grown accustomed to pain before I knew him. I wanted pleasure, too. “I love you,” I told him.

Len exhaled a sharp, raw sound. “I love you, too. I went forty-one years without you and now I can’t even go a day without losing my cool because you’re not with me. I was so worried about you I couldn’t think, couldn’t calm myself down. I was so _mad_ , Mac. I hate feeling helpless,” he bit down around the harsh consonant and grit his teeth around the words, “I hate feeling _weak_.”

I squirmed in his arms to look at him before I cupped his face in both hands and kissed him thoroughly. Len smoothed his palm up my spine and fisted his hand in my hair as he kissed me back so hard and so hot that my lips tingled and my toes curled. I whimpered, clutching at the curve of his head through the rough texture of his short hair, and broke the kiss. Len pressed our foreheads together. I felt the furrow in his brow through my bangs and nuzzled his nose with mine. “I’m weak for you too,” I told him softly, “but I don’t think you were better off without me,” I moved back to meet his eyes, “do you?”

“No,” Len said with slow vehemence before he kissed my forehead. “I was missing you before I knew you. Just didn’t know exactly what it was that I was missing until we met.”

“Okay,” I exhaled a soft whoosh of air, “as much as I’d love to stay in this bed with you, a pyrokinetic with poisonous fire is going to kill oodles of orphans in a few hours unless we stop him. I promise I’ll do whatever dirty things you want after we save her.”

Len gave me the filthy smirk I loved. “So you’ll do whatever I want, hmm?” he asked in that low intimate voice.

“Anything but anal,” I deadpanned. It was a homophonic pun. I knew he’d appreciate that.

Len burst out laughing, a loud flare of sound, and stole another kiss. I nipped his bottom lip hard enough to make him moan before I broke the kiss and got out of bed. I went to take my first hot shower in two days and I felt more like a goddess than I ever had when I was done. I shuffled into command central expecting to find my husband and a few of his Rogues. I didn’t expect to see everyone else on the team there too.

“Hi…” I elongated the sound awkwardly, “why are you guys all here?”

“Mac,” Sara gave me a tiny smile, “you saved all of our lives more than once. Helping you save whoever you’re here to save is the least we can do.”

I wasn’t a hugging person, but my comfort zone was less important than showing Sara someone wasn’t scared of touching her. I doubted anyone but Laurel had shown her that lately. I shuffled over and propped my cane against the table before I wrapped my arms loosely around her shoulders. Sara tensed like she thought I might be going for something more sinister than a hug—maybe a stranglehold or a headlock—but eventually she relaxed into it and hugged me back. That was progress.

“I’m saving a version of myself,” I explained. “It’s a long story, but I was born in a future that doesn’t exist anymore. I ended up being raised on a parallel earth because a future version of the Flash changed my fate and gave me a world in which the man who caused my death only existed as a fictional character. After he ceased to exist in our timeline, I used the version of Gideon he left behind at S. T. A. R. Labs to see whether another version of me existed in the current future. Gideon,” I said to the version of xyr that lived on the ship, “please show us the file on the target.”

“Yes, Mrs. Snart,” xe said in xyr disembodied voice. “Rose Russell. Daughter of Eric Russell and Nadine Russell, née West, a.k.a. Lady Flash.56 Descended from Wally West a.k.a. Flash, Jai West a.k.a. Flash,57 Joan Swift a.k.a. Joanie Quick—”58

“Okay,” I said, “skip to the part about her gruesome death.”

“Yes,” xyr disembodied head nodded, “a pyrokinetic operating under the alias Cobalt Blue murdered the Russells in 2157 at the hospital where Rose was born. Rose was adopted by her grandmother Emmaline West, née Brady, until she died of a stroke in 2164. Then she became a ward of the state of Missouri and went to live at a group home for metahuman children, where she remained until another version of Cobalt Blue attacked the facility in 2166, killing Rose and twenty-four others.”59

Here’s the thing: Iris’s pre-reboot backstory in the comics was that she hailed from the thirtieth century, but her biological parents—Eric Russell and Fran, which is why Iris’s mother was named Francine in show canon—sent her into the past, where she was adopted by Ira West and his wife, Nadine. Rose was, on a narrative level, very obviously a reverse Iris allegory: a girl with a floral name and a romantic link to the Reverse-Flash. Eobard also had a thing for Iris in the comics and he killed her when she refused to leave Barry for him. Good times.60

Here’s another thing: Savage had taken over the planet after a serious of unfortunate events that had wiped out ninety-five percent of the global population. There was still fallout from the nuclear war he’d won, but Gideon claimed the radiation levels had faded enough that it was safe to leave the ship. These children were unwanted and unguarded. Cobalt Blue chose to attack because the woman who ran the group home had died of cancer she’d been fighting since the first nuclear bomb dropped in 2152. Apparently the future wasn’t bright. Not even a little bit.

Anyhow.

I had thought Rose would be safe in a future where Eobard didn’t exist. I thought wrong. Apparently the feud between Barry and Malcolm Thawne—his long-lost twin brother from the comics—was a thing in the darkest timeline.61 That didn’t explain why Cobalt Blue had come after Rose, who wasn’t an Allen, but a West. I figured maybe Wally being Iris’s brother instead of her nephew in show canon was enough to make his descendants a target.

“Wait,” Ray narrowed his eyes in confusion and pointed at the screen on the tabletop. “Why doesn’t she look just like you?”

Rose had non-segmental vitiligo on her face and hands that was probably symptomatic of chronic lymphocytic thyroiditis. Apparently we were prone to autoimmune diseases no matter what timeline we were in. Rose had brown skin, dark curly hair, and pale grey eyes. Those were my eyes in her face, we both had button noses, our earlobes were the same, and so were our chins. There was a resemblance, but it wasn’t uncanny.

“Eric Russell is my biological father,” I explained, “but my biological mother was someone else. I don’t exist in this version of the future because Eric Russell married Nadine West instead. Rose is their daughter, so she’s biologically my half-sister, but she’s not me.”

“It’s the butterfly effect,” Martin said. “Mrs. Snart is a remnant of the future the Reverse-Flash was living in before he changed the past which led to that future by killing Barry’s mother, so this version of Rose was created when he ceased to exist in our timeline.”

“Okay,” Jax said, “so you’re saying there was the future where Mac came from, and now there’s another future where she doesn’t exist but this girl does.”

Martin adjusted his glasses and smiled. “Precisely,” he told Jax.

“Yeah,” I put my hand on the edge of table for balance and shifted my weight off my bad ankle, “our endgame is changing the future to the point that Rip also becomes a remnant of a future that doesn’t exist anymore.”

“Wait,” Sara turned to look at Rip, “that means this version of you won’t get your family back.”

Rip shrugged. “I’ll cease to exist if I’m lucky,” he said quietly, “but if not then I’ll continue on as a Time Master secure in the knowledge that a new version of myself is happy with my family in the divergent timeline we will create when we end Vandal Savage.”

“Okay,” I stretched the _oh_ sound out until it became an _ooh_ , “that’s depressing. Let’s get back to Operation I’d Rather Rescue Myself.”62

“Was that a _Cheetah Girls_ reference?” Kendra asked, her incredulous look unfurling into a smile.

“Yes,” I nodded. “Yes, it was. Disney Channel was hella formative for me when I was a kid. That’s probably why I’m a slut for happy endings. Also why I can slay my own dragons and dream my own dreams.” I flailed one hand above the tabletop to bring up the schematics for the group home where Rose lived. “Anyhow, my plan is that Len takes out Cobalt Blue while Shawna and I get Rose.” I tapped one of the rooms on the screen. “I figure breaking in during the attack is our best option, so anyone who wants to can protect the other kids in the group home while I pay homage to the _Terminator_ franchise.”

Ray grinned at me from across the table. “‘Come with me if you want to live,’” he quipped. “Awesome.”63

I nodded again. “Cisco will never forgive me if I don’t say that to Rose before I save her,” I told him softly. “Actually, we should make a vine to show him when we get back. Anybody know how to make a vine?”

That’s how I ended up crammed into an elevator with Jax, Shawna, Rose, and a girl in fetters that dampened her connection to the speed force attached to her wheelchair. I’d been wrong. Cobalt Blue hadn’t been after Rose at all: he was here for Sela Allen, daughter of a legacy Flash and great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Barry Allen, his last living descendant.64

Here’s the thing: Sela was also _my_ descendant. Thomas Allen, her father, was Barry and Iris’s great-great-great-great-grandson. Kenzie Allen, her mother, was descended from Len and me. Hell, she was named _for_ me—her name had been Mackenzie Snart III before she married her husband and took his name. How cool was that?

Sela was born six weeks premature on July 22, and she was still in the hospital after Rose was born on July 31. Thomas, Kenzie, Nadine, and Eric had died protecting their daughters. Sela had rheumatoid arthritis in her knees and both ankles, hence the wheelchair usage, and she had varicolored eyes. Other than her obvious inheritances from the Snart side of her family, she had the brown hair and hazel eyes she must’ve gotten from Barry on top of brown skin splotched with darker freckles.

I wondered if she’d gotten those from me, too.

“Okay,” I quipped, “both of you come with me if you want to live.”

I tried to take the fetters off using my powers, but of course that didn’t work. Shawna couldn’t teleport her out for the same reason. I groaned externally and glared at the ceiling of the elevator. “Ray,” I sighed over the radio, “I need someone who isn’t a metahuman. They put my descendant in power dampening fetters. Not cool.”

“I’ll be there faster than a speeding bullet,” Ray quipped. I should’ve never told him that he was basically Superman in another universe.

“Wait,” said Rose, “who are you?”

“I’m Mackenzie Snart,” I told her, “she’s my great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter. I guess that makes me your distant great-great-great-great-great-grandaunt. Also we’re half-sisters because of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff.” I groaned internally because that didn’t make any sense. “Rose, you’re supposed to die today. Sela is too,” I shifted my weight off my bad ankle as the elevator descended. “I’m here to take you away instead.”

That’s when the elevator reached the ground floor and dinged to let us know we had arrived. I held my cane out to keep the sliding doors open.

I didn’t take my eyes off Rose. “If you’re cool with that,” I said.65

Rose and Sela exchanged a glance that I interpreted as a nonverbal _we’ve got nothing left to lose_. “Get us out of here,” said Rose.

“G-Get th-these off-ff me,” Sela whispered.

“I can do that,” I told her. “I promise.”

That’s when Ray embiggened in hallway and zapped the fetters with his laser cannon until they unlocked.

I smiled at him as Sela rotated her swollen ankles. “I’m a Snart,” I said, “and we always keep our promises.”

* * *

**Scene VI**  
The Cosmogonic Cycle 

* * *

I had Gideon set a course for Central City at the minute we’d left 2016 after Operation I’d Rather Rescue Myself was completed and we were all aboard the Waverider.

“It’s not safe to return yet,” Rip protested. “Chronos may still be tracking us.”

“It’s not safe anywhere or any when,” I retorted, “but I think we deserve a mental health day. Rose and Sela are going to need stuff beyond what things they had at the group home. Hell,” I remembered Eobard mentioning that cows were extinct in the twenty-second century, “are there hamburgers in the future?”

“N-No,” Sela told me, “th-there are b-b-black bean b-burgers. N-No beef, th-though.”

Len side-eyed Rip. “Tell me you didn’t go for a burger when you first got here,” he said, “and no lies, Captain.”

Rip cleared his throat awkwardly. “I might’ve stopped for dinner at Big Belly Burger in Star City,” he mumbled.

Len chuckled and leaned into me from behind so I felt the sound move through him from his throat down to his belly. Mick guffawed from his seat. Sara lit up when she smiled and exhaled a throaty huff of laughter. Ray muffled his snickers in one large palm, his fingertips curling into his jawline. Kendra laughed with a warmth to the noise, sunnily. Shawna laughed unapologetically loud, grinning into it without bothering to cover her mouth. Mark rumbled like thunder, his laughter a churn of low noises that brewed in his throat like stormclouds. Jax shook when he laughed in short bursts, like small nuclear blasts of sound. Martin was more subdued, but with a wide smile that remained after his soft laughter died. I giggled and snuggled back against Len, feeling small in the best way in his embrace.

Rip huffed and turned in the captain’s chair to face the windshield as we left hypertime and landed in front of my house.

“There’s no place like home,” I deadpanned.66

* * *

It had been seven o’clock in the morning when we’d left the vacant lot in Star City. It was seven-thirty when the cabs I’d ordered to take everyone on the team wherever they wanted to go drove up. Mark was probably going to see Julie and Josh. Shawna was going to see if changing the timeline meant her dad had never died of Huntingtin’s disease. Mick went to find Bea at the fashion design company where she’d gotten an internship and take her out for lunch. Ray went to S. T. A. R. Labs to see Anna. Kendra went to visit Carter at the gravesite where we’d buried him in 1975. Sara was going to see Dinah and Sin, whom Dinah had taken in when Sara died and who’d escaped the H. I. V. E. occupation of Star City. Martin went back home to Clarissa. Jax went to see his mom. Len called Lisa to invite her over for dinner while I showed Rose and Sela where the guestroom was.

I texted Luna to get fake identities made for both of them and quasi-legal custody to explain why they lived with me. Luna texted back: **your husband killed my father**. I may or may not have gulped, even though she couldn’t see or hear me. Then she texted: **that means you get the family discount**.

Apparently she and her father didn’t have a good relationship. I arched my eyebrows at the screen of my phone, but sent her a sunglasses emoji instead of commenting on the implications of that.

I used my powers to register both girls as transfer students at the closest elementary school and to rush order a wheelchair for Sela that’d be made to fit her, because the one she’d been fettered to was not customized. It was ill-fitting and she’d been shackled to the frame like a prisoner, all of which was unacceptable. Hell, I didn’t use my wheelchair fulltime but it was still made to fit me. Otherwise wheelchairs could be unwieldy and uncomfortable.

Sela had also inherited a stuffed animal my adoptive mother had given me when I was a baby on Earth-33, a purple dinosaur that had a star on its head before I’d bitten it off with my baby teeth. Mr. Purple was a hundred and fifty years older, but putting him on a gentle cycle in the washing machine changed how gross he’d gotten in a century and a half. I gave Mr. Purple from the present to Rose so they’d have matching comfort objects.

I had no idea how to talk to kids because I always worried about saying the wrong thing. These kids, though, were my sister and my descendant. I could say whatever I wanted. Things got less awkward once I got over myself and figured that out.

“Why didn’t you save our parents too?” Rose wanted to know.

I had no idea how to respond to that. I sat there awkwardly until my husband broke the proverbial ice.

“Because all saving your parents would’ve done was create another timeline,” Len told her, “the versions of you that didn’t have parents would still exist.”

“Barry made the choice for me when I was a baby,” I explained. “I wanted you to have the chance to choose for yourselves, but there were no good options in a future where you were supposed to _die_.” Len smoothed one hand along the hunch of my spine to splay his fingers over the small of my back. I unclenched and exhaled a soft whoosh of air. “I was adopted, so I never doubted that I was wanted or loved. I never want either of you to doubt that again. I want to give you both a life and a home,” I swallowed thickly. “If you’re cool with that.”

“I’m c-cool with th-that,” Sela told me softly.

“If she’s…cool…” Rose said the word as if it meant something different in the future, “then I’m cool.”

“Awesome,” I said.

I was just happy I didn’t say “cool” again. I was married to Captain Cold, but this was getting ridiculous.

It occurred to me on the way back from the mall that we were going to need a bigger house. Mine had two bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms, a kitchen, a living room, and the attic. I’d bought the house for myself when I first arrived on Earth-1. It wasn’t meant for so many people to live in.

Rose and Sela wanted to share a room because that’s what they’d done at the group home and they felt safe together, but they would probably want their own space eventually. Louise was living in the dorms at CCU, but when school was closed she needed a room. I could’ve given her money for an apartment, but then she would’ve thought she owed me something. I’d give her first, last, and deposit as a graduation present. Then maybe she’d take it without insisting on paying me back.

I needed eight bedrooms or more. I figured that between Mick, who’d rebuilt the farmhouse he’d burned down after he inherited the acres of farmland his family had owned since the eighteenth century on his eighteenth birthday, and Barry, who’d rebuilt the half of the city after it was destroyed by the singularity, we could probably build an eight bedroom house before summertime.

I filled out an application for a construction permit with my brain. I figured I could design the building itself while aboard the Waverider and return with construction plans. Gideon had excellent rendering software that I could use.

I could have a totally accessible kitchen with handrails and enough counter space for my gadgets and everything. Hell, I could have a house with handrails on every wall for my bad days. I could have a home elevator so I wouldn’t have to take the stairs. I could have the tower library I’d been dreaming about for years and a dining room big enough to have dinner with everyone over the holidays. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of this sooner.

I was so far inside my own head I didn’t notice Len until he cupped my face in both hands and tilted my head up. I blinked and refocused to look him in the eyes. “Hi,” I said.

Len smiled without baring his teeth before he kissed me slowly, sweetly, surely. “Hi there,” he murmured after he nipped my bottom lip gently and broke the kiss.

“I think we need a bigger house,” I whispered conspiratorially.

“Yeah,” Len whispered back, “me too.”

That’s when my phone started to play “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath. Len unplugged it from the charger cable that lurked under the coffee table and offered it to me. I took the phone and swiped the screen to answer. “Hi, Ray.” I said.

“Hey,” said Ray, “do you have dinner plans?”

I shrugged even though he couldn’t see me. “Why?” I asked.

Ray wanted to take everyone out to dinner, but more on that later. I got a little bit distracted because Lisa opened the front door and kicked it shut after I hung up the phone. “What the _hell_ , Lenny?” her voice pitched higher as her nostrils flared, “you leave a voicemail telling me you’re going time traveling and then you go without me? What the _hell_?”

Oh, she was mad. At least she wasn’t giving us the silent treatment.

Lisa huffed and then her voice softened into something more vulnerable. “Why don’t you ever think to include me?” she asked.

I remembered how Lisa had to ask for the gold gun because Len didn’t think she might want a superweapon too. That didn’t mean he was opposed to the idea, because once she brought it up he grinned and told Cisco to make it happen, but he didn’t think of her without being prompted.

There was a part of Len that would always see Lisa as his _baby_ sister, whose mother had walked out on her stepson and infant daughter, whose diapers he’d changed ten times a day, whose beatings he’d taken for years to protect her from the worst of their father. Lisa was older than me, but part of him would always see a little girl in secondhand ice skates and messy braids when he looked at her.

Lisa was a grown ass woman who didn’t need her brother to protect her anymore. It was time he acknowledged that, acknowledged her.

“Rip only invited losers,” I told her, “I wasn’t invited either. I blackmailed him into letting me go on the mission too.”

“It’s not over yet.” Len said in his smoothest voice. “If you want in—”

“I want in.” Lisa smiled, all blood red lips and deadly sweetness. “I’m not letting you have all the fun.”

* * *

Here’s the thing: Ray built his company from the ground up, but he’d done it with the fortune he’d inherited from his wealthy Connecticut family, of which he became the sole legitimate heir after his brother died. Palmer Technologies had always been a name on the Forbes Global 2000 list, had been since it was first published in 2003. Now their founder and former CEO couldn’t even afford a subscription to _Forbes_ magazine because he was flat broke. Instead of dealing with the reality of that, he reached for his wallet and his face just fell the moment he realized he had no wallet because he had no money.

Ray established a living will after Anna was presumed dead, so all of his assets were liquidated upon his supposed demise and donated to various charities his family had supported for years. Felicity spent the profits his company had made on the Arrowcave, so between her and his will he didn’t have any money left. Ray didn’t think inviting everyone to dinner at a fancy restaurant through. If he’d thought it through, he would’ve remembered that he couldn’t treat himself. Or anyone else, for that matter.

I sighed and ordered crème brûlée for everyone. It was advertised as the best in the city, so I wanted to try some.

“I’m not eating here,” Mick said. “I hate the tiny portions and the weird sauces. I want steak. Or ribs,” he grinned. “Or mayberibs and steak. Now that’s dinner.”

Len side-eyed Ray. “That’s a compelling argument,” he said as his hand smoothed up from my kneecap to squeeze my thigh underneath the table. “I say we get that dessert to go and eat out elsewhere.”

I couldn’t tell whether that was an innuendo or not. I flushed hot when he gave me that filthy smirk. Of course it was an innuendo. This was my husband we were talking about.

Len smirked wider. “You’re so _cute_ ,” he told me before he leaned in and whispered conspiratorially into my ear, “tonight I’m going to kiss you _everywhere_. That’s a promise.”

I was blushing so brightly it was probably visible from the space formerly occupied by the planet Krypton when I handed the waiter my black AmEx Centurion Card to pay for the crème brûlée.

After we got dessert to go, we all ended up at Saints and Sinners. It was that or Big Belly Burger, which I vetoed because we’d taken Rose and Sela there for lunch. I had veto power. Who knew? I texted **we’re going to the bar and we might be back later than anticipated** to Louise, who’d agreed to babysit Rose and Sela. Louise sent me two emojis: a slice of pizza and a thumbs up. I figured that meant they’d ordered pizza for dinner and everything was good at home.

“Hey,” Bea scooted into the booth across from me and reached over the table to pluck at the edge of the bandage on my shoulder. “Mac, you’re hurt. What happened?”

I gnawed on the inside of my cheek before I decided to bite the bullet. “I got shot,” I told her.

Bea snorted, but I knew she got pissed off like that when she was worried. After all, getting angry was better than feeling powerless. “What, you forgot how to stop a bullet?” she asked.

“There were a lot of bullets, okay?” I said defensively.

That’s when Mick returned to the booth with an appletini for Bea and a basket of pub fries for me. Bea stole a few of the crispy ones because she knew I liked the squishy ones the best.

“Thank you,” I smiled at him and booped his arm, “you’re my family too, y’know.”

Mick scoffed, but he was smiling too until he took a long drink from his beer.

“Aw, _querido_.” Bea nuzzled his shoulder and buried her wide smile there after he sat in the booth next to her.

I’d eaten half my fries when Len quit beating Ray at pool to tell me that it was time to change the bandages on my forearms. I shrugged and followed him into the bathroom.

“This isn’t a sterile environment,” I quipped.

Len cocked his head in concession and smirked at me. “Good thing I’m not actually going to change your bandages until we get home,” he said in his smoothest voice. Then he grabbed my hips and lifted me onto the edge of the sink.

I squawked indignantly, but I got distracted from how unsanitary this was when he kissed me. Len kept one hand on my hip while his other hand fisted in my hair. It wasn’t gentle, not even a little bit. It was so intense I was gasping into his mouth, clutching at the contours of his back through his shirt, my whole body trembling because I was a big needy mess.

It was embarrassing how much I’d missed him after only a day apart. Luckily he felt the same way.

Len broke the kiss to nip my jaw. I tugged my bottom lip between my teeth to stifle a moan after he peeled my dress off my shoulders and lifted my breasts out from beneath the cups of my bra. Len kissed my neck while he teased my nipples, licking and biting and sucking on the sensitive flesh over where my pulse was thundering, flicking the hard nubs with his thumbs in rough swirls. I whimpered and clung to his shoulders. Len nipped that particularly sensitive place behind my ear before he gently bit my earlobe. “Spread your legs,” he ordered in that low intimate voice.

I was aching for more of whatever he wanted to give me. I didn’t even care that people had probably vomited on the floor. I did what he wanted and opened my thighs until my knees were bent over the corners of the sink. Len cupped my face in one hand to hold my gaze and slipped his other hand inside my panties. I moaned, but I kept my eyes on his.

Len stroked the folds of my cunt slowly to tease me a little bit more before he swirled two fingertips into my hole. I whimpered again, my hips lurching up without my permission, and he smirked. “I know you said whatever I want,” he whispered conspiratorially, “but I never thought you’d actually let me fuck you here. I’ve been thinking about this since the night we first met.”

That’s when he slipped two fingers inside me and smirked wider at the desperate sound I made. Then he crooked his fingers to hit my g-spot and swept his thumb sideways over my clit. I moaned, sharply, and squirmed on the edge of the sink. “Well,” I quipped, “you fucked Hartley in here, you fucked Mick in here, I guess now it’s my turn.”

Len cocked his head in concession. “That’s true,” he told me smugly, “but I married you.”

That was true, but I knew he only married me because it wasn’t legal for two men to get married in Missouri until 2015. If it’d been legal at any point before 2013, he would’ve married Mick so they’d never be forced to testify against each other in court.

Here’s the thing: Len and Mick had been together for years before that job they pulled on which Mick got burned, literally. Mick had been almost eighteen when Len first went to juvenile detention at fourteen, and he’d protected him. That’s when their partnership started. Mick was also the first person Len ever loved outside of his fucked up family, and those feelings were mutual. Neither of them acknowledged their feelings, but that didn’t change how they’d felt about each other. Hell, how they still felt. Len said they were finished after they pulled that job, but they weren’t. It wasn’t romantic love anymore, and they’d never said the words out loud, but they loved each other. I figured they always would. I wasn’t his first love. I was just the first person he’d let himself love without lying to himself about how he felt.

Hartley was a different story, but more on that later.

Anyhow.

Len cradled the curve of my head to keep me from throwing it back against the mirror and breaking the glass. I was moaning and bucking my hips, all sense of shame gone, my vision glossing over at the edges. I wanted to close my eyes and _feel_ him, but I knew he wanted eye contact. Len took whatever he wanted and what he wanted in that moment was to make me lose control.

I wasn’t a control freak like him. I didn’t need to be in control. I needed _him_. I was so close my whole body was trembling. “Len,” I gasped, “please.”

“ _Yes_ ,” Len exhaled the sibilant in a fervent hiss and rubbed my clit a little rougher, “come for me.”

I did what he wanted and came so hard I screamed, two orgasms spooling into one long radiant bloom of pleasure that curled my toes and coiled below my belly. Len buried his face in my hair and held me while he stroked me through it. I might’ve drooled on his shoulder a little bit.

That’s when Cisco banged on the bathroom door. “Um,” he shouted over the music and through the wood. “Mac, you need to stop doing whatever you’re doing in there with Captain Cold because Heatwave is trying to kill Barry.”

Len grit his teeth around a frustrated noise. “Mick,” he growled more to himself than me.

“Oh,” I groaned and scooped my breasts into my bra again. “Oh no.”

Here’s the thing: the Mardon brothers were orphaned after the Great Flood of 1991, which breached the Central City floodwall and submerged the downtown area where both of their parents used to work. It had been the Great Flood of 1993 on Earth-33 and there weren’t as many fatalities because it didn’t breach the floodwall, but on Earth-1 hundreds of people drowned. Including their parents. Mark and Clyde were adopted by their only living relative: an uncle who lived in Smallville, Kansas.

Mark got kicked out when he was seventeen, after he came out to his uncle, and their neighbor Flannery Calhoun took him in. Clyde stayed with his uncle for a few months. Then he decided he didn’t want to live in that house without Mark, so instead he left his porn out for his uncle to find. It was a crude way to come out as gay. It was also a super effective way to get kicked out like his brother had before him.

Flannery lived on a farm that grew wheat and corn along with her grandson Michael Calhoun—also known as Mick Rory. Mick was thirty years old then, he’d long since rebuilt the farmhouse that he’d burned down, and he lived with his grandmother because she was the only family he had left after the fire. This was actually how Mark had known who Len was before they met during the breakout, because he’d known Mick for almost eighteen years. They’d lived together until Mark and Clyde were in their midtwenties. They’d become a family.

Mark had been on antipsychotics and antianxiety medication since he was a teenager. It had taken Mick almost two years to get Mark in therapy and get him on meds. Barry had undone sixteen years of work by putting him in the pipeline. Mark had gone through withdrawal from the meds he’d been taking for years during the three months he was imprisoned in the bowels of S. T. A. R. Labs. Which had triggered a dissociative state. Which in turn had made him go from the very specific plan to avenge his brother to a horrible plan involving a prison break and threatening hundreds of children to get at Barry. Hell, in this timeline Mark hadn’t done anything to warrant Barry locking him up, not that Barry knew about at that point in the story. Yeah, he’d intended to—and intent was a crime in some cases—but he didn’t actually create a tidal wave or threaten Joe or Iris. All he’d done in this reality was lose the only person he’d been trying to protect his whole life. That, and he’d shot James Spivot. There was a reason he’d needed those few hundred dollars, but it didn’t matter. Mark had lost Clyde the same way Patty had lost her father. Maybe that was the deterministic nature of the universe balancing the scales. Maybe not. No matter what, I figured everyone had suffered enough.

Shawna had gotten him back on his meds after his plan to kill Barry failed, and he was still adapting to being medicated again. It was going to take some time for Mark to get back to the level of mental stability he’d had before Clyde died.

Also, at some point Mark tried to commit suicide by jumping off a building. That’s how he learned he could fly.

Anyhow.

Mick had overheard Cisco tell Len that Barry was actually the Flash. That’s why he was trying to kill him.

I couldn’t even blame him. I hated everything about the pipeline. Cisco had come up with the idea to repurpose the cells as a prison, but Eobard had known it potentially had that function when he built S. T. A. R. Labs. Also, if he’d read Mark’s file beyond his criminal record, Barry could’ve avoided taking him off his meds—including the hormone therapy he needed as a trans dude.

I wondered if they’d done anything when he and Shawna had their periods. I hoped Caitlin would’ve thought to give them pads or tampons at least, but I doubted Barry or Cisco would’ve thought of that.

I knew Caitlin had taken samples from the metahumans in the pipeline. I was Subject Zero, Barry was Subject One, and every metahuman they’d locked up during the first season had become Subjects Two through Twelve. That was part of the research Caitlin had been doing at Mercury Labs: using the samples to research and map the metagene as part of the human genome. I figured her endgame was to isolate the metagene and figure out a way to turn it off. Which it was, and she had, but more on that later.

I let Mick get a sucker punch in. Barry took the punch because there were people in the bar who didn’t know he was a speedster and he didn’t want to compromise his secret identity. I stepped in between them after he fell to the floor.

Mick stopped and glared down at me. I hated that I was a foot shorter than pretty much all of the dudes I knew. “Move,” he snarled, “he deserves this.”

Len cocked his head to look at Barry on the dirty bar floor. “No one’s saying he doesn’t,” he said in his calmest voice, “but this isn’t the time for that.”

Mick glanced down at the erection in his jeans, hard evidence that we hadn’t been changing my bandages in the bathroom. “I bet you’re only saying that because you keep getting cockblocked,” he grumbled.

“It’s true,” Len exhaled a melodramatic sigh, “and I’d be balls deep in her right now if you hadn’t started a barfight—”

“Okay!” I yelped. “Too much information, dude. I know we haven’t been having sex for two days, but seriously. Cool it.”

“Two days?” Cisco said incredulously. “That’s nothing.”

I blushed and looked at the floor. Caitlin had squatted to reset the nasal fracture before it could heal wrong. I figured she didn’t want to kneel because the floor was gross.

“Wait,” Cisco said, “how often do you guys…”

I flushed brighter and held up two fingers.

“Twice a day?” Caitlin asked, her voice pitching awkwardly higher. “Seriously?”

“Well,” Len smirked, “if we’re talking about how many times I make her come, it’s actually four or five.”

Caitlin looked up at me with her eyes comically wide. “Does he really give you four or five orgasms every day?” she asked.

“Not every day,” I hedged, “sometimes it’s only three because the sex was rough so I’m too sore for more later. I think the most he’s ever given me was seven, but then we couldn’t have sex again for a whole day because I was so oversensitive that it hurt to walk…”

I fizzled out on the consonant when I noticed everyone was listening to the awkward conversation about my sex life. Lisa was on the dancefloor with Shawna, Brie, Kendra, and Sara, but they weren’t dancing now. Anna was in a booth with Ray, but they weren’t talking. Bea was still in our booth—so called because we always sat there when we came to this bar—drinking a second appletini that matched her green hair. Mark was sitting at the bar not drinking because he was back on his meds. Rip was at the other end of the bar, watching us all. I figured the habit he’d made as a Time Master of spectating rather than participating was dying hard.

Kendra saw Cisco and looked at the floor, guilty for breaking his heart when she might’ve loved him back a little bit. Lisa narrowed her eyes and flicked her gaze between them. There was a sliver of hurt in the seam of her lips, the way her mouth folded into a thin red line. Cisco went to order a drink at the bar and side-eyed Mark after he got there, giving the atmokinetic a wide berth. Caitlin stood before she smoothed her skirt over her knees and helped Barry up, his nose healed with no evidence of breakage. Mick exhaled noisily, his nostrils flaring, and walked away.

Len squeezed my shoulder before he went to sit in our booth with his partner and my best friend. I noticed he wasn’t drinking, which was weird, but I didn’t question it.

“Hey,” Barry stuffed his hands in his pockets and shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other, “can I talk to you?”

I nodded. “Yeah.” I shuffled over to one of the lounge areas and flopped onto a cushioned bench. “What’s up?”

“Snart said I deserved to get punched for some reason.” Barry glanced over his shoulder at my husband. “What exactly does he think I did?” he asked, probably remembering how Len had said Lewis deserved to die. Len didn’t say people deserved to get hurt unless they’d done something bad…and if a bad guy thought Barry did something bad, then he probably had.

I heaved a sigh. I didn’t know how Mick and Mark had known each other when I had this conversation with Barry. I only knew Mark was a trans dude and that I hated the pipeline. “Barry,” I gnawed on the inside of my cheek before I attempted to articulate, “you condone the torture of and illegal experimentation on metahumans if they’ve committed any kind of crime. It’s like the Tuskegee Institute, except S. T. A. R. Labs is speciesist instead of racist and I won’t let what you’re doing continue for decades. Okay, locking them up isn’t as bad as not curing their syphilis, but you’re othering your own kind. Hell, you’re probably part of the reason it was legal for them to surgically implant power dampers in metahumans without their consent and fetter our great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter to her wheelchair in the future—”

“Wait,” Barry gaped at me in such an exaggerated way I could only describe his expression as gobsmacked, “ _we_ have descendants?”

I squawked indignantly when I realized he was thinking Sela was descended from a child he and I could’ve had together. “No!” I yelped and then dialed it back to a whisper. “Her father was descended from you and Iris. Her mother was descended from Len and me. I wouldn’t have sex with you in a million years. Not even the possibility of a vibrating tongue is enough incentive to make me want to bump uglies with you.”

Barry forgot to get insulted by that and tilted his head in thought to consider his shiny new options. “Why didn’t I think of that?” he asked mournfully.

“Because you don’t write fan fiction,” I deadpanned. “Barry, I brought two nine year old girls back from the future because they were supposed to die there. It was legal in the future to surgically implant power dampers in metahumans without their consent. It was legal to fetter or cuff them with power dampers, too.”

“How is that my fault?” Barry retorted, his voice twisting defensively on its way out from his throat.

“Because that’s the future you’re making every time you treat a metahuman as subhuman,” I told him softly, “a future where S. T. A. R. Labs has taken over the city, our great-great-great-great-grandchildren die protecting their infant daughters, and twenty-five metahuman children are slaughtered because they’re powerless to defend themselves. Barry, as the Flash you have the power to influence the hearts and minds of everyone in our city, for better or for worse. Lady Zeus doesn’t have that kind of power. Green Arrow doesn’t, either. Oliver told you that you could inspire people once. I believe that.” I reached out to boop his sternum, where the lightning emblem was when he wore his supersuit. “I believe the Flash can do more than just saving the world,” I said. “I believe you have the power to make the world a better place, one that doesn’t need as much saving.”

* * *

Rose and Sela had gone to sleep by the time we returned home. I felt a little bit guilty about that, but when I opened the door to the guestroom to check on the girls I found them curled up together under the quilt my grandmother had made for me with their starless purple dinosaurs. Their beds had been pushed together when we went to get what things they had from the room they’d shared at the group home. I figured this was the way they’d slept for years.

Louise was lying on the couch with Jesse asleep on top of her. I booped her nose and flailed when she tried to freeze my fingertip.

Len heaved a melodramatic sigh. “Louise,” he said, “you know the rules. No frostbite in the house.”

Louise, nineteen but still totally a teenager, stuck her tongue out at him.

I muffled a giggle in one palm. I didn’t want to wake Jesse, because she’d been having trouble sleeping after everything Zoom had done to her. I knew she dreamed about the cage he’d kept her in. Mark and Shawna had nightmares about the pipeline, too. Hell, the Weather Wizard had brewed a storm in his sleep that almost destroyed the Waverider somewhere between St. Roch and Tromsø when he’d been in the throes of a particularly bad night terror.

Anyhow.

Len kept his promise to kiss me everywhere after I took a shower and braided my wet hair while he took his. I thought he’d meant that in the figural sense, but he was being literal. I had to cover my mouth when I started giggling because I was ticklish in places and I didn’t want to wake anyone with the noises I made. It was fine at first, because I was facedown and I muffled the sounds in the sheets; but keeping quiet became more of a challenge after I squirmed onto my back. I pressed both hands over my mouth as he worked his way up from my feet to my head.

Luckily he was holding each ankle when he kissed the arches of my feet. Otherwise, he would’ve gotten himself kicked in the face. It was a reflex, okay? Don’t judge me.

I hadn’t known he was naked. I’d been focused on his mouth—the rough texture of the stubble on his face, the pressure of his lips against my skin, the teasing swipes of his tongue, the scrape of his teeth over my bare flesh. I was currently hyperfocused on where he _hadn’t_ kissed or licked or bitten me. Those were the places where he knew I wanted his mouth the most.

Len gave me soft kisses over my forehead, my eyelids, my nose, and my cheeks, but he started using a hint of teeth once he finally kissed my lips. I kissed him back and moaned when he bit my bottom lip hard enough to make my hips pitch up beneath him. I was so wet for him it was actually a little bit uncomfortable; my inner thighs were slick with sweat and my own arousal, and I was probably going to have to change the sheets in the aftermath.

I gasped as he nibbled on my neck. “Was this your plan for tonight?” I asked him breathlessly.

“No,” Len nuzzled my neck and I could hear a smirk in the cadence his voice, “my plan for tonight was to fulfill my fantasy of fucking you at the bar. I’ve been thinking about that for a very long time, but then I remembered what you said to Raymond about how unpretty Vostok made you feel. I see a goddess when I look at you, Mac. I don’t know how to worship anything, but that’s what I wanted to do to you tonight.”

I didn’t feel pretty. I felt awkward with the lights on, sweating and dripping wet on top of the sheets, my whole body coiled tight like a wire meant to conduct an electric current. I knew how to fix that, though. “Len,” I whispered in his ear and begged him: “fuck me, please.”

Len groaned when I wrapped one of my legs around his waist and ground my hips up into his so the hard length of his cock rubbed against my wet folds. It was hot and sticky, but he felt so good I never wanted to stop.

That’s when he kissed me again, his elbow slanted over my shoulder as his fingers tangled in my hair. Len reached down between our bodies to fist his other hand around his cock and rub the head of him against my clit. I licked into his mouth and swept my tongue over his to make literal sparks between us. Len broke the kiss before he thrust all the way inside of me in one hard stroke.

I jolted when the head of him bumped my cervix and covered my mouth with my bad hand to muffle the harsh little noise I made. Len caressed my cheekbone with his thumb and held my gaze while he fucked me slowly. I shifted my hips to get more friction and that only made me more aware of him inside me, how thick he was and how he rubbed the head of his cock against my cervix in a tight circle with each slow thrust.

Len made a guttural noise low in his throat and hunched to press his forehead against mine. I closed my eyes and nuzzled his nose with mine, gasping and moaning softly every time he hit my g-spot on his way out before he thrust all the way inside me again. “Say my name,” he ordered in a raw voice.

“Len,” I whispered, “that’s so good, Len, you’re so good—”

Len exhaled sharply and shuddered above me. “Say that you love me,” he whispered back and he sounded so undone that I knew he was begging me for once.

I squirmed under him as pleasure frothed all through my belly and thighs until my toes curled against the sheets. “I love you,” I told him. “I…”

That’s when I came so hard my whole body trembled, heat throbbing between my legs and booming inside me like a thunderclap. I opened my eyes after my orgasm ebbed and I could _see_ every electrical impulse in his body. Len groaned and came inside me after I kissed his neck and generated sparks down his spine to the base of his cock, and others along his perineum to his prostate. It was so intense that his knees gave out from under him. Len collapsed onto me, shuddering and exhaling soft desperate sounds into my hair. I nuzzled his clavicle and smoothed my hands over the facets of his back, feeling the familiar musculature and slubs of scar tissue, inhaling the smell of his skin intermingled with sweat and our sex.

Len kissed my lips again, his mouth lingering on mine while my heart clenched horribly inside my chest, before he buried his face in the space between my neck and shoulder. “I love you too,” he said in a low voice made rough by how good his orgasm was, “let’s never go two days without sex again, hmm?”

I tugged my bottom lip between my teeth and shook with quiet, wheezy laughter. Then I kissed his temple and said, “Okay.”

* * *

I got people to help me unload most of what I’d brought onto the Waverider the next morning. I left a stack of books to read, the bags of cash, the toilet paper, the bottled water, and a copious amount of snacks. I figured the fabricator could make anything else I needed or wanted. Rip tried to make a big stink over us bringing Lisa aboard the Waverider, but that wasn’t enough to stop a Snart from getting what she wanted. Hell, the Snarts now outnumbered him three to one—plus two superweapons and fulgurkinesis. I liked our odds to win if Rip ever wanted a real fight.

That’s how we all ended up sitting around the table: Rip in the captain’s chair, me occupying the singular chair across from him, Len and Lisa in the pair of chairs to his far left and my right, Mick and Ray in the seats next to theirs, Martin and Jax to his far right and my left, and Kendra and Sara in the pair of seats beside them. Gideon set a course for the nineteen-fifties and we flew off into the temporal zone.

“Okay,” I asked Rip once the ship was back in hypertime, “who exactly was your mom? It’s never specified in the comics on Earth-33.”

“I didn’t have a mum,” Rip told me. “I did have two dads.”

“Booster Gold,” I said, “and…?”

“Blue Beetle,” Rip informed me shortly.

“Wait,” I crossed my ankles over my cane to hold it between my knees and held up both hands, “Ted Kord is your other dad?” Rip nodded. “But he’s cool and you’re…” I flailed one hand at him, “…like if Mal Reynolds was made out of dehydrated mashed potatoes instead of Nathan Fillion.”67

“ _Firefly_ was אַבָּא’s favorite show,” Rip huffed, “we often watched it when I was young.”

That explained the brown coat. Apparently he’d styled himself after the captain of the _Serenity_ on purpose.

“Wait,” Lisa side-eyed him from her seat, “you’re Jewish?”

“Ted Kord is Jewish,” I told her, “so…”

Rip shook his head. “אַבָּא was transmasculine,” he explained, “and as being Jewish is matriarchal, he didn’t know whether I could be considered Jewish because he wasn’t a woman despite being assigned female at birth. Regardless, אַבָּא died a few weeks before my fifth birthday. After that, my father sent me away to live in East London with my Aunt Michelle68 and Lady Cyrilla Sheldrake, Countess of Wordenshire, her wife.”69

Apparently the first Squire was a trans lady in the Arrowverse and Blue Beetle was a trans dude. Awesome.

That’s when something collided with the ship that sent everyone who hadn’t strapped themselves in flopping and flailing onto the floor like a low polarity shoal of fish out of water.

“What was that?” Sara asked as she managed to lurch gracefully to her feet, somehow.

“We have been struck with an explosive projectile,” Gideon explained.

Ray exhaled a sarcastic huff and fastened his futuristic seatbelt. “No kidding,” he muttered.

“We’re in the temporal zone,” Rip said, “I don’t understand. No one should be able to—”

That’s when another projectile had a meet cute with the Waverider. I hadn’t felt either one. Not even a little bit. Apparently being in hypertime threw off my groove.

“You were saying?” Len snarked back.

“Captain, a scan of the vessel suggests that it is the bounty hunter, Chronos,” Gideon informed Rip.

“Aw man,” Jax said, his voice pitching higher in distress, “this guy has impeccable timing!”

I giggled. I couldn’t help it! I loved bad puns. No matter what.

Gideon performed evasive maneuvering that did nothing to shake the Boba Fett knockoff hunting us through space and time. “He appears to be following us,” xe said in xyr disembodied voice.

I closed my eyes and swallowed thickly as Gideon fired countermeasures against the attack. It was like the time I rode the Tilt-a-Whirl at Viking Fest with Kel because he wouldn’t get on the ride without me, only infinitely worse. Unfortunately there were no curly fries or elephant ears in the near future like there had been at Viking Fest after I survived the Tilt-a-Whirl. Only an inferior Ravager playing boy king of a dystopian Star City, but more on that later.

“Have we lost him?” Martin asked.

“Yes,” said Gideon, “but not his missile. Our AFT shield is gravely compromised.”

“Initiating evasive maneuvers,” Rip said before he pressed a button the armrest of the captain’s chair.

“Impact in three…” xe said, “…two…one...”

I yelped when the missile hit and the sound was swallowed by the explosion that ensued, but I didn’t open my eyes. I was terrified, okay? Don’t judge me.

“Sir,” Gideon said to Rip, “we’ve been knocked out of the time stream.”

“What does that mean?” Kendra shouted over the roar of our descent.

“It means we’re crash landing,” Rip told her in a voice that pulsed with horror, “in place…and time.”

* * *

1\. _Doctor Who_ 5x01 (“The Eleventh Hour”) 3 April 2010.

2\. Lowell Cunningham, _The Men in Black_ (1990).

3\. René Descartes, _Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences_ (1637).

4\. Antoine Léonard Thomas, _Éloge de René Descartes_ (1765).

5\. TARDIS stands for Time and Relative Dimension in Space. It first appeared in _Doctor Who_ 1x01 (“An Unearthly Child”) 23 November 1963.

6\. _Flash_ Vol.2, No.220 (“Rogue War: Chapter 1”) May, 2005.

7\. Mathieu le Nain, _Allégorie de la Victoire_ (1635).

8\. Jan Davidszoon de Heem, _Still Life with a Peeled Lemon, Oyster and a Silver Plate with Grapes, Plums and a Façon-de-Venise Glass Filled with White Win, All on a Wooden Table Partially Draped with a Green Cloth_ (1651).

9\. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, “I Second That Emotion” from _Greatest Hits_.

10\. _Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman_ 2x18 (“Tempus Fugitive”) 26 March 1995.

11\. _Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman_ 3x14 (“Tempus, Anyone?”) 21 January 1996.

12\. **Word of God** : ([x](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WordOfGod)).

13\. _The Dirty Dozen_ (1967).

14\. David Clinton first appeared in _Atom_ Vol.1, No.3 (“The Time Trap!”) November, 1962.

15\. St. Roch first appeared in _Hawkman_ Vol.4, No.1 (“First Impressions”) May, 2002.

16\. Captain & Tennille, “Love Will Keep Us Together” from _Love Will Keep Us Together_.

17\. Bonnie Baxter first appeared in _Showcase_ Vol.1, No.20 (“Prisoners of 100 Million BC”) June, 1959.

18\. Miranda Shrieve first appeared in _Flashpoint: Frankenstein and the Creatures of the Unknown_ Vol.1, No.1 (“Part 1: Weird War Tales!”) August, 2011.

19\. _Gilligan’s Island_ (1964-1967).

20\. _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ 2x10 (“What’s My Line, Part 2”) 24 November 1997.

21\. _Titans_ Vol.1, No.12 (“The Immortal Coil, Part 3 of 3”) February, 2000.

22\. “We Go Together (Reprise)” from _Grease_ (1971).

23\. Isaac Asimov, “Marooned off Vesta” (1938) first published in _Amazing Stories_ (1939).

24\. _Fantastic Voyage_ (1966).

25\. Ella Fitzgerald, “That Old Black Magic” from _Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Harold Arlen Songbook_ (1961).

26\. _Army of Darkness_ (1992).

27\. _Justice League_ Vol.2, No.26 (“Forever Numb”) February, 2014.

28\. “Cell Block Tango” from _Chicago_ (1975).

29\. “Freddy, My Love” from _Grease_ (1971).

30\. Flo Rida feat. will.i.am, “In the Ayer” from _Mail on Sunday_ (2008).

31\. _The F. B. I. Story_ (1959).

32\. _Dillinger_ (1973).

33\. F. D. Palsey, _Al Capone_ (2004) i.33.

34\. Margaret Skinnider, _Doing My Bit for Ireland_ (1917).

35\. James Joyce, _Ulysses_ (1922) II.viii.155  & II.xii.287.

36\. Stephen Chbosky, _The Perks of Being a Wallflower_ (1999).

37\. _The Simpsons_ 7x16 (“Lisa the Iconoclast”) 18 February 1996.

38\. _Gilmore Girls_ 1x15 (“Christopher Returns”) 1 March 2001.

39\. Robern Thawne appeared in _Flash_ Vol.3, No.8 (“Reverse-Flash: Rebirth”) February, 2011.

40\. John Malálas, _Chronographia_ (563 BCE).

41\. Valentina Vostok first appeared in _Showcase_ Vol.1, No.94 (“The Doom Patrol Lives Forever!”) September, 1977.

42\. _Justice League: Generation Lost_ Vol.1, No.8 (“Part 8: Would It be Okay with the Management If We Check Out Early?”) October, 2010.

43\. _Justice League_ Vol.2, No.24 (“Forever Strong”) December, 2013.

44\. Douglas Adams, _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ (1978).

45\. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” from _Leaves of Grass_ (1855).

46\. _Legally Blonde_ (2001).

47\. Betty Everett, “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)” from _You’re No Good_ (1964).

48\. Beyoncé, “Irreplaceable” from _B’Day_ (2006).

49\. _Firefly_ 1x07 (“Safe”) 8 November 2002.

50\. _Flash_ Vol.2, No.182 (“Absolute Zero”) March, 2002.

51\. _Flash_ Vol.2, No.113 (“Race Against Time! Chapter 1: Wallyworld”) May, 1996.

52\. Mikhail Arkadin first appeared in _Firestorm_ Vol.2, No.64 (“Through the Gauntlet”) October, 1987.

53\. “U Can’t Touch This” from _Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ’Em_ (1990).

54\. _The Emperor’s New Groove_ (2000).

55\. _Super Mario Bros._ (1985).

56\. Nadine West first appeared in _Flash_ Vol.1, No.237 (“The Thousand Year Separation!”) November, 1975.

57\. Jai West first appeared in _Flash_ Vol.2, No.225 (“Rogue War: Conclusion”) October, 2005.

58\. Joanie Swift first appeared in _Adventure Comics_ Vol.1, No.181 (“Joanie Swift, Queen of Speed!”) October, 1952.

59\. Emmaline West first appeared in _Flash_ Vol.1, No.133 (“Secret of the Handicapped Boys!”) December, 1952.

60\. _Flash_ Vol.1, No.283 (“Flashback”) March, 1980.

61\. Malcolm Thawne first appeared in _Speed Force_ Vol.1, No.1 (“Burning Secrets”) November, 1997.

62\. The Cheetah Girls, “Cinderella” from _The Cheetah Girls_ (2003).

63\. _Terminator_ (1984).

64\. Sela Allen first appeared in _Flash_ Vol.2, No.146 (“Chain Lightning, Chapter 2: Time Like a River”) March, 1999.

65\. _Doctor Who_ 3x10 (“Blink”) 9 June 2007.

66\. _The Wizard of Oz_ (1939).

67\. Ted Kord first appeared in _Captain Atom_ Vol.1, No.83 (“Finally Falls the Mighty!”) November, 1966 and he was first mentioned in _Arrow_ 1x21 (“The Undertaking”) 19 May 2013.

68\. Michelle Carter first appeared in _Booster Gold_ Vol.1, No.6 (“To Cross the Rubicon”) July, 1986.

69\. Cyril Sheldrake first appeared in _Batman_ Vol.1, No.62 (“The Batman of England!”) December, 1950.


	5. The Transformation

**I am here because I could never get the hang of Time.**  
**This hour, for example, would be like all the others**  
**were it not for the rain falling through the roof.**  
**I’d better not be too explicit. My night is careless**  
**with itself, troublesome as a woman wearing no bra**  
**in winter. I believe everything is a metaphor for sex.**  
**Lovemaking mimics the act of departure, moonlight**  
**drips from the leaves. You can spend your whole life**  
**doing no more than preparing for life and thinking:**  
**“is this all there is?” Thus, I am here where poets come**  
**to drink a dark strong poison with tiny shards of ice,**  
**something to loosen my primate tongue and its syllables**  
**of debris. I know all words come from preexisting words**  
**and divide until our pronouncements develop selves.**

Terrance Hayes, “Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy”

* * *

Shock Value  
**Part 1**  
_A Book of Myths in Which Our Names Do Not Appear_  
**Act V**  
The Transformation

* * *

**Antihero** , _n_.

1\. A central character in a story, movie, or drama who lacks conventional heroic attributes.

2\. A foil to the traditional hero archetype, a movement that indicated a literary change in heroic ethos from feudal aristocrat to urban democrat, and was the shift from epic to ironic narratives.

3\. An indecisive central character who drifts through his life and is marked by ennui, angst, and alienation.

* * *

**Scene I**  
The Primordial Hero and the Human 

* * *

Gideon told us we’d crashed into October sixth, thirty years from the present day, before xyr temporal navigation system went offline. Apparently we’d landed on top of a smoldering building and everything was on fire. It was a city of flames and flickering shadows, a dark skyline that shifted into a hellscape. Mick was in heaven, though. It was exactly his kind of place.

I shuffled out into the dark street with my eyes wide open, in a way. I was trying to _see_ energy like I had in St. Roch circa 1975 after Damien attacked me and then again when I was fucking Len. I figured if there was anyone out here, I’d be able to _see_ them through electroreception before I saw anything with my nearsighted myopic eyeballs.

Ray looked skyward while I kept my gaze on the ground. “That looks like a Palmer Tech building,” he told us as he pointed to a familiar skyscraper, “but why does it have a Smoak logo on it?”

“Wait.” Sara must’ve recognized something because a note of horror crept into the cadence of her voice. “This is Star City.” Then she whirled on Rip in midstep. “I thought you said the timeline was safe!” she shouted, her voice pitching higher on the word _safe_.

That’s when I _saw_ three people: one coming at us for a frontal assault, one behind us, and another to the side, forming a perimeter, a basic ambush tactic. I generated a wad of lightning in the hand that I wasn’t using to hold onto my cane. Len exchanged a glance with Lisa over my head and they both drew their weapons.

“Star City was intact in 2016,” Rip explained. “This is 2046.”

That’s when one of the people I’d _seen_ hopped on top of a rusty old pickup truck with surprising grace—he wore a familiar green hood and body armor, but on a totally unfamiliar person. Instead of the human disaster that was Oliver Queen in any decade, we got Connor Hawke. 1

Here’s the thing: in the comics the second Green Arrow was the son of Oliver Queen and Sandra Moonday Hawke, a biracial woman.2 According to spoilers I’d seen on Earth-33, the Arrowverse version of Connor Hawke was John Diggle, Jr. That meant they’d erased Sandra twice: once by giving her story arc from the comics to Samantha Clayton—a whitewashed version of her—and then again by making him the son of John Diggle and Lyla Michaels on the show.

Only that’s not what happened in this version of reality. Quentin Lance was right when he’d said there could’ve been “dozens of little Oliver Queens running around.” Oliver got Sandra Hawke pregnant when he was in high school, she never told him about it because she didn’t want him to think she’d gotten pregnant on purpose, and she’d raised their son as a single mom. Oliver didn’t meet Connor until he was a teenager, and reluctantly let his son join his masked vigilante squad.

John Diggle, Jr. had named himself after his father when he transitioned—he was Sara Diggle when he was born—and he’d named himself after his mentor after they both died protecting the city during the Uprising of 2031.

“Don’t move,” Connor said in a voice distorted by a machine that I could feel at his throat.

“Oh,” Sara exhaled a soft noise in sheer relief at seeing the familiar silhouette. “Thank god.”

I could _see_ them surrounding us, but electroreception didn’t tell me what they were armed with or who they actually were. I figured one of them had guns while one of them had another bow from how they stood, but I could’ve been wrong.

Sara faltered when he said not to move again. “It’s me,” she told him with a tremor in her voice. “It’s Sara.”

That’s when a woman dressed in a red hood drew back her bow and pointed an arrow at Len. It was made out of a crude metal alloy, high-carbon steel and ferromagnetic metal: cobalt and iron alloyed with tungsten. Lian Harper told him to drop the cold gun.3 I short-circuited her brain and stepped back as she fell to the scorched earth. Zoe Torres broke the ambush formation to help her friend.4

Here’s another thing: in the comics, Zoe Torres was the daughter of Deadshot and a sex worker named Michelle Torres, but on the show she was Zoe Lawton, daughter of Deadshot and his wife Susie Lawton,5 who in the comics had been his ex-wife and mother of their son Eddie Lawton.6 I figured Susie might’ve been Susan Torres until she married Floyd, because Zoe wasn’t whitewashed in this potential future.

There was a lot of whitewashing on the show, actually: the Claytons were whitewashed versions of the Hawkes, the Lawtons were whitewashed versions of the Torreses, the version of Sin on the show was a whitewashed version of her counterpart from the comics, White Canary7 was a Chinese girl in the comics but Sara appropriated her name on the show, the actor who played Ra’s al Ghul in season three of _Arrow_ was a white dude, the actor who played Danny Brickwell8 was the Juggernaut, bitch,9 and also a white dude, and Eliza Harmon10 was whitewashed too.

Anyhow.

That’s when all hell shook loose. Connor shot a flaming arrow and Mick fired back at him—pun unintended—with the heat gun, tall Zoe deadlifted tiny Lian over her shoulder and retreated, and Lisa hit Connor in midair with a gilded splatter of liquid gold. Which didn’t do much to slow him down, but I digress.

We scattered after he landed: Mick and Martin ducking behind one pile of rubble, Sara and Rip taking cover behind another, Ray yanking Kendra down behind yet another mid-retreat to keep her upper body out of the crossfire, Jax flailing to where Len crouched like a predator with his superweapon, and Lisa hauling my ass to safety. I huffed because I’d generated a field to shield myself before the projectiles had started flying. Which rendered the hauling of my ass unnecessary. At least I knew she cared. That was good enough for me.

“This guy a friend of yours?” Mick snarled the question at Sara as slings and arrows flew through the night air. “I don’t like him!”11

Rip shot two plasma bullets in the general direction of the arrows while Len used his cold gun as cover fire—or ice, in his case. I kept any non-laser rounds from hitting us with my powers.

“What are you doing?” Sara yelled at Rip.

“It’s called shooting back!” Rip yawped at her in return.

“This can’t be the Green Arrow,” Kendra said in a voice that pitched higher in disbelief.

“That’s not Oliver Queen!” Sara insisted.

Ray peeked over the edge of the rubble. “Sure dresses like him,” he quipped.

“Shoots arrows like him,” Len retorted at the same time.

“I’m like 99.9% sure that’s Connor Hawke,” I said, “otherwise known as Green Arrow 2: Electric Boogaloo.”12

“Whoever he is,” Jax shouted, “I don’t plan on sticking around to shish-kabobed by this dude!”

“Yeah,” said Mick, “he’s right.” That’s when he glanced at Len, then at Lisa, and finally me. “Let’s stay behind and kill him!” he suggested.

Rip shook his head and said, “we need to return to the ship!”

Connor aimed an arrow at our retreating backs. I changed the trajectory of the arrowhead and it hit a sign that read _EVERYTHING MUST GO!_ That included us, I guess.

* * *

Okay, to recap: Team Arrow circa 2046 was John Diggle, Jr. a.k.a. Connor Hawke, the sequel a.k.a. Green Arrow III, Lian Harper a.k.a. Red Arrow III, and Zoe Torres a.k.a. Deadshot II. There was no sign of Team Arrow circa 2016 beyond the logo on a burning Smoak Technologies building. Rip had crashed the Waverider into a building in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, and we were in one of the darkest timelines until the ship was repaired. Good times.

“All right, Rip.” Sara gave our captain a warning look. “Tell us the truth.”

“You’ve all seen how the timeline is malleable,” Rip explained, “in flux until it is set. You, in particular, Mrs. Snart, are living proof of that,” he flailed one hand at the screen on the table, “but this future is not set.”

I flopped into one of the chairs that was still intact after the crash. Len went to stand at the edge of the table and put one hand on the tabletop, idly touching the metal. Lisa folded herself into the seat to my left and started to braid her hair, because long golden curls worn loose were impractical in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Mick narrowed his eyes at Rip in confusion.

Rip made a frustrated noise. “I told you it was dangerous for any of you to know too much about your own futures, because the events that you dread could very well come to be due to your actions to prevent them.”

“It’s called a predestination paradox,” I said, “like Savage promising to kill Rip’s family in the future because Rip tried to kill him in the past, except the future came before the past linearly because of time travel shenanigans. Also why this version of Rip is probably going to cease to exist if and when we end Savage, because if Savage never murders his family, then he never goes on this mission, and none of this malarkey ever happens.”

Mick side-eyed me over his shoulder. “I think you think too much,” he said.

Lisa nodded, a slow descent of her chin. I exhaled with enough force to flap my lips, but my pout fizzled out when I yawned.

“Believe me when I tell you,” said Rip, “that the best thing for you and this mission is to make the repairs to the Waverider here in 2046,” he jabbed his finger at the tabletop as he enunciated each syllable of the year we’d crash landed in, “then head back to your own time and make sure that none of this ever comes to be.”

After that melodramatic self-fulfilling prophecy was made, Rip showed Jax and Ray to the engine room so they could repair the engine and he could remove the neuromorphic interface, the artificially intelligence technology and navigational matrix which made Gideon what xe was. Lisa followed them because she wasn’t lying when she told Cisco that she’s a structural engineer in.

Lisa started high school as a sophomore after the whole debacle with her dad and Roscoe Dillon effectively killed her dreams of Olympic gold. Within the year she ruled the school. Lisa was smart and popular, a lethal combination—and she was good at math. Like, scary good. Lisa was also the first person in her family to go to college, and to graduate from college. With honors, _magna cum laude_ , because she worked her ass off to earn her Bachelors of Science in civil engineering. Then she went to grad school and got her Masters of Science in structural engineering. That didn’t guarantee her a job in her STEM field, though, so instead she ended up becoming a thief like her brother. Still, she went to the symposium at Mercury Labs. That’s where she had met Brie, a few weeks before her boss found out she had weaponized her robotic bees.

If you’re wondering how and why she got her Class A Commercial Driver’s License, it was because she drove Lester’s ice cream truck after his dementia got worse. It didn’t require a Class A CDL—Class C would’ve sufficed—but Lisa figured she might as well go big, then go home.

Anyhow.

Rip wanted the crooks to steal the prototype of a neuromorphic interface from Smoak Technologies.

“It’s not money. It’s not jewels. It’s not a valuable artifact,” Mick grumped as he held the interface for Gideon in his gloved hand, “you’re just lucky I’d steal anything right now.”

“As I suspected,” Rip said in a haughty, slightly huffy tone.

I rolled my eyes at how British he was as I shrugged my jacket on. It was the bomber jacket I’d fabricated in the seventies, with the sleeve torn by the bullet that had grazed me patched and good as new.

Len tugged his goggles down around his neck and worked his hands into his black leather gloves. “We’ll get your gizmo,” he said, “you just get this bucket flying again.”

That’s when Sara made her entrance. “I’m coming with,” she said, grabbing her white leather jacket up off a stack of shiny metal boxes and shoving her left arm into one sleeve with unnecessary force.

“No!” Rip yawped in protest, “No, you are not, you’re too emotionally connected to this city. We’ve been over this.”

“I’m over you,” Sara retorted, “you’ve got us on a mission to change the timeline for yourself and you won’t even let us look at our futures?” her nostrils flared as she rolled her eyes at him, too. “Now, I know this city better than anyone else and you’re going to need me out there. So,” she took a menacing step forward into his personal space, “either I’m coming with or we can find out if the Time Masters are as good at teaching people to fight as the League of Assassins.”

“I will hold your flower,” I deadpanned. I didn’t know whether she knew that meme or not, but I was used to being married to someone who didn’t get my references. I still wanted to offer.

Sara got it, though, because she turned and gave me a smile over her shoulder while Rip opened the hatch.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Len asked when I tried to step out.

I arched my eyebrows at him in a nonverbal recitation of our wedding vows. _Where you go, I go_.

Len heaved a melodramatic sigh and swept out his arm. “After you,” he said.

“Snart’s very protective of you,” Sara told me quietly once the hatch was shut behind us, “does he not realize you’re a stone cold badass, too?”

I giggled at the bad pun. Cisco would’ve been laughing his ass off if he’d heard that one. Hell, I liked Capt. and Mrs. Stone Cold Badass better than Capt. and Mrs. Cold. “Len doesn’t want to lose me,” I said, “but he’s not stopping me either. R-E-S-P-E-C-T, and what it means to me is that my autonomy doesn’t get infringed on, ever. Len is smart enough to remember that.”13

“Oh, I remember.” Len kept one hand on his cold gun as his other hand smoothed up from the small of my back to splay over the hollow between my shoulder blades through layers of fabric. “I remember you sitting on my face last time I tried to keep you from doing something I didn’t want you to do.”

That had been the night before I returned to Earth-33. Len stopped me while I was changing into my graduation outfit and basically tried to screw me into submission. I sat on his face in nothing but my grandmother’s pearls and he fucked me from behind in the aftermath. I kissed him goodbye when I left, but I didn’t say it out loud.

“I do what I want,” I deadpanned. I wasn’t going to apologize for leaving again. Len forgave me after I kept my promise and came back home to him. It was time to forgive myself.

I put my earpiece in to eavesdrop on the Waverider as we walked down the dark street. Lisa was flirting with Kendra over an intake manifold, Ray kept getting made fun of for being a ray of sunshine, and Jax had just realized he was having gay thoughts about him. Martin was getting all in a tizzy over it because he thought _he_ was the one having gay thoughts. Until he remembered that he was psychically connected to another person. I would’ve giggled, but I kind of wanted to smack him upside the head for thinking gayness might be contagious, like the cravings for pizza he’d gotten from Ronnie. How about no.

Mick side-eyed Rip. “This is just a potential future,” he said, “it doesn’t matter if we kill anyone here, right?”

“Well,” Rip grumbled, “to avoid the risk of a paradox it’s probably best to refrain from killing anyone.”

“Not gonna promise anything,” Mick retorted.

Sara looked up at the surrounding architecture as she sidestepped the rotting wooden remains of a broken crate. “Laurel’s apartment used to be over here,” she said more to herself than anyone else.

Len took my bad hand in his to keep me close to him, intertwining our fingers and squeezing gently. I squeezed back and used my cane to knock a piece of rubble away. “Seem to remember something about your father being a police captain,” he said.

“Your point?” Sara asked.

“Did a hell of a job,” Len snarked back.

“My father and everyone else would’ve never let this happen,” Sara retorted, “unless they were all dead.” Then she abruptly turned a corner. I figured that meant she didn’t want to speculate on how things had gotten so bad. “Palmer Tech’s just two blocks up this way,” she told us, “or at least it used to be.”

That’s when something exploded and we took cover inside an abandoned old school bus. I winced and popped the joints in my bad ankle. “Ow,” I whispered as a cacophonous medley of motorcycle engines roared outside.

“It’s like World War Three out there,” Len shouted over the noise as he sat next to me. Then he gently touched the knee I’d tucked over my bad ankle, a nonverbal _you okay?_

I nodded and turned to peek out through the grimy bus window. There was so much going on—so many people revving up their engines and shooting at each other—that I couldn’t see exactly what was happening, but it looked like Green Arrow 2: Electric Boogaloo had gotten caught in the crossfire of a gang war.

“It’s beautiful!” Mick yelled.

“We need to find another route,” said Rip.

Len wrapped an arm around my shoulders and yanked me across his lap. That’s when the window shattered and bits of broken glass ricocheted against the dense magnetic field I generated to shield everyone. Sara ran out into the street after someone hit Connor and someone else hit the hood of the bus with a metallic _thud_.

“Miss Lance, don’t—” Rip made a disgruntled noise when she didn’t listen and yawped after her, “Sara! Dammit!”

I flailed a little bit, trying to see if Sara was okay. Len took his hands off me once he realized I wanted him to let go. “Sorry,” he murmured with a hint of remorse in his quiet tone. “Wasn’t thinking.”

I put my bad hand on his shoulder for balance when I leaned in and kissed the corner of his mouth. “You were protecting me,” I told him softly. “You have nothing to apologize for.”

“You three,” said Rip, “don’t move. We’ll be right back.”

“…right,” Mick raised the heat gun in mock salute. Then he whispered, “We’re not going to stay in here, right? Imagine all of the looting we could do in this chaos.”

Len turned to me and glanced down at my ankle. “I’m not leaving Mac,” he said with slow vehemence.

“I can walk,” I said. “I can’t run away, but I’m capable of shielding us from arrows and bullets, so.”

Len smirked, one corner of his mouth unfurling. It wasn’t sexual, for once. I still wanted to kiss him, because I was trash. “How about we stretch our legs at the bank we passed three blocks back?” he suggested.

No sooner had we left the school bus when we were surrounded by dudes on motorcycles. Len wrapped an arm around my waist to mark his territory. Mick sized up the gangsters. Neither of them bothered to raise their drawn guns.

There was a dude riding on the back of a motorcycle driven by another dude who dismounted and pointed an automatic rifle at Mick. “Drop your weapons,” he said, “and hand over your wallets.”

I snorted. I couldn’t help it! That voice was pitched too high to intimidate anyone.

Len idly curled his fingers into the flesh of my waist as he tilted his head and narrowed his eyes at the dude. “Wait,” he said incredulously, “are you actually trying to mug us?”

“What is this,” asked Mick, “amateur hour?”

That’s when a tall, burly man emerged from a weird rig with a gun attached to the hood. I thought it might’ve been a jeep in a former life, but I didn’t know enough about cars to say that for sure. If the crude fur coat he wore was a symbol of his status, and I assumed it was, then he was their leader.

“If you don’t do what my man says,” he told us, “we’re going to crush you into the pavement like a couple of ants…” he leered when he saw me, “…and I’ll show your girl how it feels to get fucked by a real man.”

Mick snorted, but he was less amused by the dude after he threatened to rape me. “Really,” he said in a voice that was more threat than anything else.

“Or,” I fluxed the geomagnetic field around his groin and watched his face go puce in the firelight, “I could make it so he never gets to fuck anyone ever again.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Len gave my waist a little squeeze before he let go and smoothly moved to put himself in between me and a potential rapist. “But first we’re going to teach this guy a lesson,” he said in his calmest, deadliest voice.

I figured the lesson was that people who threatened to rape anyone deserved to die by flame or frost. I might’ve felt bad about that, but I’d seen the girl who’d been driving his weird rig flinch when he threatened to rape me. Which meant he’d probably done more than threaten her. Which in turn meant that he deserved whatever he got.

I watched him puff up his chest when the dude who’d held the rifle took his coat and groaned internally. This was hypermasculinity at its worst, and as much as I wanted the dude to get his ass kicked, I hated the whole idea of solving problems with fists instead of words.

That’s when he tried to punch Len in the face. I fluxed the geomagnetic field around him and he ended up dislocating his own shoulder.

“Omigod,” said the girl, “I think she’s a metahuman.”

“No way,” the dude holding the coat scoffed, “metahumans are a myth.”

Mick quit fucking around and shot the gang leader with the heat gun while I arched my eyebrows at the implications of that. If metahumans were mythical creatures thirty years in the future, what the hell had happened to all of the metahumans in our past?

“Where did you get that?” the dude holding the coat asked, shaking like an overexcited volcano about to pop its top.

“EBay,” said Mick in a voice that oozed with sarcasm. “Now,” he turned and let the spastic dude put the fur coat on him, “your boss will not be needing this.”

I rolled my eyes at him. I couldn’t help it! Mick was a fashion disaster. I side-eyed him, caught the girl watching me, and whited my eyes out to see whether she’d flinch again. Instead she held my gaze. That’s how I knew this girl was a survivor, too.

Len holstered the cold gun before he tucked me under his left arm. I felt small when he did that, but in the best possible way. “Well,” he said in his smoothest voice, “this has been fun, but I think it’s time to leave.”

“Why would we leave?” Mick retorted.

They stared at each other for a long, tense moment. Then he went to drive the weird rig—which, upon closer inspection, was actually an ATV. Len shrugged and glared at another dude until he got off his motorcycle. I got on behind him after I folded my cane up and stuffed it inside my ginormous purse.

I listened to Sara talking to Connor over the open channel I figured she’d forgotten about. Connor told his dead namesake about the Uprising of 2031, when Grant Wilson brought his army to Star City to finish what his father had started with the Mirakuru army he created.14 Rip found Sara after the Deathstroke knockoff did, and they both fled along with the future version of Team Arrow.

I also eavesdropped on the ship, and I overheard Martin hinting that Kendra might be interested in Ray. I had no idea why he’d think she might be interested in romance when her soulmate had died less than a week ago, but I did laugh when Ray said: “We’re aboard the Waverider to save the world, not hook up.”

If only he’d kept thinking that. It might’ve saved me some trouble, but more on that later.

* * *

There was a nonstop party at the nightclub the gang had misappropriated as their headquarters. Two chandeliers hung dangerously low from the ceiling, a taxidermy bear was guarding the door, and lights both electric and fire danced with their shadows as the people moved to the cacophonous music blasting from mismatched speakers. Mick stood in the center of the room, drunk off his ass to the point of giving everyone a nickname: the dude who gave him the fur coat was Fonzie, after Arthur Fonzarelli, and a dude who’d given him a chalice was Kenickie, after one of the T-Birds from _Grease_. 15

Len eventually got bored of the spectacle Mick was making of himself, but I stopped him before he could try to talk him into leaving again. “We should be getting back to Rip and Sara,” he said, his worry a sharp edge in his voice.

Sara was listening to Connor explain how Team Arrow circa 2016 had died in the Uprising of 2031, including Roy Harper, who’d returned with his wife—a poisonous metahuman named Jade Nguyen—and their daughter.16 Oliver also had a real knack for staying alive despite everybody presuming he was dead, but that was neither here nor there.

“Rip and Sara are okay,” I told him, “they’re as safe as they can be under our wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey circumstances. I think we should let Mick get this out of his system.”

“What if he really wants to put down roots,” Len scrunched his mouth into a thin abhorred line and furrowed his brow as he cased the nightclub, “here?”

I shook my head slowly. “Nope,” I popped the _p_ sound. “Not possible.”

Len took my hand and curled his fingers underneath mine. “How can you be sure?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Maybe he would if you were the only person who mattered to him,” I said, “but you’re not. Mick has Mark, and Bea, and Lisa, and me, and for all that he likes to think he wants to watch the world to burn, he’s never thought ahead to what he’d do with the ashes.”

“Because it’s a fantasy,” Len murmured as he swept his thumb over the corrugation of my knuckles, “it isn’t what he really wants.”

“I’m not saying he doesn’t want to burn everything,” I clarified, “but he isn’t just a pyromaniac. Mick wants more from this world than to see it burn. Otherwise he wouldn’t have taken care of the Mardon brothers after his grandmother died, and he wouldn’t love Bea like he does. All we have to do is give him time to remember that.”

That’s when Mick came to refill his chalice. Len grit his teeth and his jaw clenched around the words he wanted to say to his partner, his best friend. I grabbed the lapel of his leather jacket, put myself on his lap, and kissed him as thoroughly as I knew how. Len made a deep pleasure noise low in his throat and kissed me back so hard it curled my toes. I moaned into his mouth and cupped his face in one hand. Len quit holding my other hand to grab my hips, squeezing hard enough to leave a mark and make me moan again. I kissed him until I was tingling all over, until my glasses were fogged up, until I forgot that I needed air.

Unfortunately the Deathstroke knockoff crashed the party and cut our makeouts short by swinging his sword around, pun unintended. “This party is over,” Grant screeched, “everyone hit the streets, and everybody on them! I want Green Arrow dead by morning!”

Mick was still wearing the monstrosity of a fur coat, and he looked like he was hulking out when he stood up. “Listen, pal. This is my gang,” he said, “the only orders they take are from me.”

“Might be your gang,” Grant said, “but it’s my city.” Here there was a tense moment when Len narrowed his eyes at the Deathstroke knockoff over my shoulder before he screeched: “Green Arrow is running with a female assassin in white, and a Brit in a brown coat! Kill ’em all!”

That’s when everybody in the club scattered like flies on the hunt for a fresh corpse, and then there were three. I used my cane to get back on my feet and side-eyed Mick.

Len went to stand beside his partner and folded his arms. “Looks like your new minions are about to go on a citywide manhunt for Rip and Sara,” he said.

“So what?” Mick asked.

“They’re going to kill our friends,” Len said in his calmest, deadliest voice.

I’d never actually heard Len call anyone his friend out loud. Apparently that wasn’t lost on Mick. “Since when did they become our friends?” he snarled.

“You tell me,” Len snarked back. “You and Raymond seemed to get pretty tight back in Russia.”

Apparently my husband wasn’t just a jealous loser over me. Mick had been the only person he could talk to for decades. They’d been together before he knew me, and he had loved Mick before he knew what love was. Len still wasn’t great at feelings, but that didn’t change what was true: he married me, but their partnership was a ’til death did they part deal too.

“I’ve never been tight with anyone,” Mick retorted.

“Mick,” Len growled and grit his teeth around the harsh consonant, “it’s time to go.”

“You’re not the boss of me!” Mick roared and reached for his gun.

“Actually,” Len snapped at him, “I am.”

They glared at each other, tension bleeding into the stale air until I made a garbage disposal noise to split their focus and thaw out the big damn cold wave brewing in between them. “Okay,” I exhaled with enough force to flap my lips, “enough.” I shuffled in the general direction of the door before I turned to face them both, the business end of my cane making hollow sounds with every step I took. “Mick, do you really want to stay in this future? Without us? Without Mark? Without Bea? Without your family?” I arched my eyebrows at him, a nonverbal _seriously?_ “Mark has lost his parents, your grandmother, his brother, the woman he loves, and now you want to abandon him? I call shenanigans.”

Mick glowered at me. “You know I hate it when you talk like that,” he snarled, “all calm and sensible and crap, so you make sense even though I know you’re manipulating me. You sound like Grams. It’s creepy.”

I knew he got attached to me at first because I reminded him of Flannery, a librarian who took no shit and brought home strays. I was using his memory of his grandmother against him. I might’ve felt bad about that, but we needed him at home. Len needed him. I wasn’t going to leave him behind.

(Oh, the irony.)

That’s when I overheard Sara telling Rip they should split up and sighed. I was going to have to play dirty if our favorite assassin was going to become a bad horror movie cliché. Luckily the nightclub was only a few miles from the abandoned Smoak Technologies storage facility. It would take us five minutes to get there. Or less.

“I know Bea told you that she loved you for the first time before we left.” I adjusted the strap of my ginormous purse over my shoulder while Mick glowered like I’d told his deepest, darkest secret. “I know you’re not exclusive, but a lack of monogamy doesn’t mean you don’t love her back.”

Mick and Bea were polyamorous. Bea had a girlfriend named Tora Olafsdotter, who’d been the frost to her flame in the comics instead of Louise,17 and Mick had a domme that he went to every week for “punishment” named Rhosyn Forrest.18

“I do,” Mick told me with a thread of vulnerability woven into the rough timbre of his voice, “I do love her back.”

“Okay,” I elongated the _y_ sound awkwardly, “but if you stay in this future, she won’t ever know that. Not cool, Heatwave.”

Was I being totally oxymoronic? Yeah. Was it super effective? Hell yes.

Mick chugged what was left in his chalice and threw it on the ground. Then he shucked the coat and hung it on the outstretched paw of the taxidermy bear, grinning at the inanimate caniform. “Where are they?” he asked me after he nodded at the bear in mock farewell. I figured he did that because he was still a little bit drunk.

That’s how we ended up riding into the warehouse like the cavalry: Mick on the ATV, and Len driving a motorcycle with me internally screaming as I clung to him through the waffling fabric of his black thermal shirt. I didn’t like going over a hundred and seventy miles an hour, okay? It was terrifying. Not terribad, but _terrifying_. I was shocked—pun unintended—that I didn’t have a panic attack.

I unclenched after Len parked the motorcycle and generated simultaneous electromagnetic pulses that dropped everybody who didn’t matter to the plot before my husband or his partner had a chance to fire—or ice—their guns.

“Gentlemen,” Rip greeted us as he lowered his plasma rifle. “Mrs. Snart, your timing is exemplary.”

I made a garbage disposal noise at him. “Was that incompetent Time Master code for ‘Thank you, Mac, for riding on the back of a futuristic motorcycle through a post-apocalyptic wasteland to save our collective asses,’ or were you raised by wolves instead of twenty-fifth century gentry?”

Zoe lived up to her codename and pointed a gun at my face. I paramagnetized to nozzle of her sniper rifle to the cement floor and took her down. In hindsight, I hadn’t eaten and I was hypoglycemic. Which shortened my fuse until it was pretty much nonexistent. This was, of course, one of many reasons why I carried a ginormous purse around. I extracted half an almond poppy seed muffin from the confines of a plastic bag, inhaled it, and zipped the leftover wax paper up inside the same bag to dispose of later.

“Sorry,” I told Rip. “I’m a bitch when I don’t remember to feed me. That’s my bad.”

Rip nodded. “I accept your apology,” he told me stiffly. “Miranda…” his voice melted into nostalgia with a healthy dose of regret when he said her name, “my wife…was much the same way.”

Sara caught her breath and spun on the balls of her feet to look at the fallen men on the floor of the warehouse. Apparently she didn’t see what she’d been looking for, because her angelic face was tarnished with worry when she asked: “Where’s Connor?”

Zoe knelt to pick up his recurve bow. “He’s gone,” she whispered more to herself than us.

Rip pressed his lips into a thin line and said: “He’s been taken.”

“These are Grant Wilson’s men,” Sara deduced after she crouched to get a closer look at their Slade-esque masks.

“Yeah,” said Mick, “the guy with the half face and the body armor has a real mad-on for the kid in the hoodie.”

That’s when Rip took Sara aside in a doomed attempt to talk our favorite assassin out of going to get Connor back. Zoe, meanwhile, slung the recurve bow across her back and walked out. I figured she’d parked some method of transportation outside. Lian had been their lookout, and Zoe was meeting her outside so they could go rescue Green Arrow 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Len tilted my face up and looked into my eyes. I’d been so far inside my own head I hadn’t noticed him until he touched me. “Hey,” he murmured. “What’s wrong?”

“I need a nap,” I told him with a yawn. “I’m exhausted all of a sudden and I don’t know why.”

Len cradled the back of my head in one gloved hand and stole a quick kiss. I wrapped my arms loosely around his neck and nuzzled his nose with mine after he broke the kiss to press our foreheads together. “I was going to hit Mick over the head and drag him back to the time ship if I had to,” he whispered conspiratorially, “but your way works too. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” I whispered back. Then it was my turn to kiss him softly, and I escalated by nibbling on his bottom lip. Len made a low noise of approval before he wrapped an arm tight around my waist and pulled me flush against him, so there was no negative space between our bodies.

That’s when Rip cleared his throat. I turned to face him, blushing hot when I saw Sara was giving me a look that said _Really?_ without saying anything at all. “We need to get this,” Rip held up the case that held the neuromorphic interface, “back to the Waverider.”

I overheard Jax talking to Martin as Len drove the motorcycle through the hellscape and back to the ship. Martin had talked to Ray about not hooking up and put the idea of Kendra as a well of untapped—pun unintended—romantic potential in his head. Ray tried to flirt with Kendra, but Lisa cockblocked him viciously by making his crush object laugh at his attempts at awkward wooing. I might’ve felt bad, if Ray hadn’t been trying to hit on a girl who’d lost the love of her many lifetimes a week ago. Unfortunately that’s exactly what he was doing.

I went to take a nap while Rip gave Sara an hour to save Connor and return to the ship. I woke up with Len wrapped around me: our legs tangled up together, both of his hands splayed over my flabby stomach. I took one of his hands in mine and turned it over to look at his watch. Len nuzzled my neck and gently squeezed my fingers. “Hi there,” he said in that low, intimate voice.

“Hi…” I said in a voice that was heavy with the shallow dregs of sleep. “Sara isn’t back yet, is she?”

“No,” Len told me softly. “We should go and figure out what’s taking her so long, hmm?”

I nodded. Len kissed my neck, sucking gently on where my skin thinned over my pulse to make me moan, before he took his hands off me and got out of bed. For my husband, there was always time to steal and to tease me. That never changed.

Rip was assembling the squad when I shuffled into command central. Kendra and Ray had flown out through the hatch, which gave me a terribad idea. I figured there was no time, well, like a potential future to test my theory.

Len shouted my name after I stepped over the edge of the roof, testing the fluxing geomagnetic field to see whether or not it would hold my weight. I grinned when my foot didn’t fall through thin air, and stepped into the skyline of the hellscape. Len grabbed my right arm, Lisa grabbed my left, and Mick grabbed the elastic band of the belt around my waist. I flailed, but held myself in midair with the fluxes keeping me grounded.

I turned to look at Len over my shoulder with my eyes whited out. “Let go,” I said, “please.”

Len held up his hands in mock surrender and took a long step back. Mick grunted and I winced when the elastic band snapped back against my waist. Lisa side-eyed them incredulously, but loosened her grip on my arm with a huff a few seconds after that.

I walked on air until the novelty wore off, which took a few steps, then exerted force on the magnetic field to generate acceleration. I flew to where our woman in white was fighting some of the Mirakuru soldier knockoffs and crash landed on top of two dudes with a soft _oof_ sound. Ray landed smoothly and caught the handle of an axe someone was swinging at his head. Kendra made a gust of updraft before she folded her wings over her back and punched a dude in the face. I shrugged and used my cane to get back on my feet before I zapped another dude who’d been coming up behind Sara. I figured I could work on my landing techniques pre-apocalypse.

“How’d you convince Rip to stay?” Sara yelled over the gunfire and garden variety screams.

“Actually,” Ray told her, “sending in the cavalry was his idea.”

I generated a dense magnetic field when a man tried to stab me with his sword—it was short for a _katana_ , and I assumed it was a _wakizashi_ since most of the weapons being used by these men were vaguely _nihonto_ -esque, but that was neither here nor there—and watched the blade ricochet with enough force to knock him back. Lisa smiled poisonously and shot him in the head, suffocating him with liquid gold.

Len grinned at me wide and warm, baring his teeth, a flash of white in the firelight. “Since when can you fly?” he asked.

I grinned back, giving as good as I got. “Since now,” I quipped.

“Guess that makes you my flygirl,” Len told me smugly.

Of course he made a _Star Wars_ reference. “I’m not getting into the garbage chute,” I deadpanned.19

Green Arrow 2: Electric Boogaloo had shot the Deathstroke knockoff down, but Grant wasn’t dead; he was just a little tied up. Oliver stood over his unconscious body, the hand of the prosthetic arm he wore clutching air instead of the compound bow he’d thrown to man who’d taken his legacy onto his shoulders. Connor exhaled sharply after Lian touched his cheek with her gloved hand and closed his eyes to recollect himself before he opened them and looked to Oliver, to see what was going to happen next.

“Cowards, all!” Mick roared as the members of the gang he’d led scattered like ashes in the stale hellish wind.

I exhaled with enough force to flap my lips and shuffled over to Len. “Okay,” I tucked my bad hand in the crook of his elbow and leaned into the sideways line of his body, “but what about the whole ‘metahumans went extinct’ thing?”

“No idea,” Len murmured, “but we’re not going to let that happen.”

“Maybe they didn’t go extinct,” Lisa pointed out. “Maybe someone figured out a way to suppress the metagene so nobody has superpowers in the future.”

“Or you were hunted to extinction,” Mick postulated quietly. “It started happening while you were in another world. S. T. A. R. Labs gave the cops suppressor cuffs and they’ve been locking metahumans up ever since. It’s not just the C. C. P. D. and their Anti-Metahuman Task Force anymore, either. Keystone has a Department of Metahuman Aggression now, and they’re basically a SWAT team that only guns down people with powers. It’s been pretty bad.”

Which explained why all the chatrooms and message boards I’d set up for metahumans to use anonymously had been a digital ghost town. Without me there to secure the servers for half a year, no one wanted to risk losing their anonymity. Most of the people I’d managed to get back in contact with after I returned from Earth-33 had thought I’d been killed or imprisoned by the Flash. I’d been neglecting the metahuman community I’d set up when I arrived on Earth-1 because I’d joined Team Flash and become Lady Zeus. It was time to get back to the roots I’d put down, I guess.

That’s when Oliver stopped rushing out some exposition and shifted his focus to his godson. “That’s good shooting, John.”

Connor made a disgruntled noise at being called the wrong name and took the stairs until he stood on the same level as his godfather. “It’s Connor,” he said, and gave Oliver back his compound bow.

“Either way.” Oliver took the familiar weapon in his flesh and blood hand. “It’s Green Arrow.”

Sara accompanied the reforged Team Arrow back to the Arrowcave to say goodbye while we all boarded the Waverider. I overheard Ray asking Kendra out, heard her turn him down, smiled when he took “no” for an answer. Then, I quit eavesdropping and shucked my bomber jacket to keep myself from overheating before I told the mechanized door to open and shuffled out of the room.

Len fell into step beside me and smiled when I took his hand, intertwining our fingers. I had to let go when I flopped into the seat across from the captain’s chair and booped Gideon’s new interface with my brain, a nonverbal _welcome back_.

Mick was looking out at the hellscape through the windshield. “I’m gonna miss this place,” he said.

“Yeah.” Ray gave him a pat on the back and Mick didn’t stop him. That was progress. “They seemed like your kind of people.”

“Nah.” Mick glanced over his shoulder at his partner—at his family—and a fleeting smile unfurled on his lips. “I know who my people are.”

Len took my hand after he folded himself into his seat. I squeezed his fingers and closed my eyes as Rip took off into hypertime, once more into the flux that made the future what it was, or would be.

* * *

**Scene II**  
The Hero as Warrior 

* * *

Rip navigated the Waverider into the past. I took another nap during the flight and Gideon’s navigational system was still offline when I woke up, so I didn’t know exactly when we were. All I knew was that we were no longer in 2046 and we were stuck there until Rip could pinpoint a place and time where Savage was. I made an unhappy noise when I noticed Len wasn’t in bed with me and squirmed to scrape the dregs of sleep from the corners of my eyes.

That’s when I noticed I was losing my hair in dark clumps that slithered over the pillow as I squirmed onto my elbows. I didn’t scream or have a panic attack, but my anxiety churned like an electrical storm, a surge that moved through me while I literally pulled my hair out.

Sara was sparring with Kendra, Rip was in the captain’s quarters, Jax was repairing minor damages that were done to the ship to keep himself busy, Martin was reading one of the paranormal romance novels I’d brought with me since he hadn’t thought to bring a book, Ray was tinkering with his exosuit, and Lisa was explaining to Mick and Len that she’d been taking over the Santini operation in Central City since Len killed Vincent Santini. That’s how she’d become the leader of the Rogues: by doing what Len said he was going to do and forming a crew out of Mark, Shawna, Brie, Hartley, and Axel Walker, who apparently was a trans girl in this version of reality, but I digress.

Actually, that’s how Shawna met Brie: she’d teleported into the women’s side of Iron Heights and teleported out with her future girlfriend. Brie was just lucky she’d had bottom surgery before she started using her bees to kill people, because otherwise she would’ve still had a dick and they would’ve incarcerated her on the men’s side. It wasn’t legal to change genders in Missouri without having gone through bottom surgery. Unfortunately. That’s why Mark was still legally a woman, and he couldn’t marry the mother of his child when they were trying to get pregnant before the particle accelerator explosion.

Anyhow.

I made my way to the only bathroom without anybody seeing me and looked in the mirror. I had no eyebrows, no eyelashes. I could see that I’d lost all of the fine vellus hair on my body. I’d tried to wax my eyebrows at home one summer when I was twelve, between seventh and eighth grade, and I totally waxed them off. I knew how I looked without eyebrows. It wasn’t pretty. Nothing about this was pretty.

I was _bald_ , okay? I had no hair anywhere. I had no idea how that happened, but that didn’t change anything. It was a good thing we were in space, because I looked like an alien.

I slumped onto the toilet and ugly cried for a while. I must’ve left a trail of frizzy tendrils on the floor of the ship, because Mick deduced that I was in the bathroom before he knocked on the door.

“Mac,” he said, “are you cutting your hair in there or something?”

I was shaking too hard to give him anything but a wordless answer: a sharp, tattered sound I exhaled while I shuddered and sobbed.

“Okay,” said Mick, “I’m getting Snart.”

I whimpered, still hyperventilating, and choked out: “ _Don’t_.”

Mick heaved a sigh. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I…” I gasped, my tongue too thick in my mouth for me to form words, or do anything but gulp air. “I…”

Mick exhaled loudly and I knew him well enough to know his nostrils were flaring wide. “Okay,” he echoed. “Don’t tell me, but at least come out so I can take a leak.”

I shook my head before I remembered he couldn’t see me. I went to hide behind the shower curtain before I told the mechanized door to open. I’d grown up sharing a bathroom with Kel, and I’d been sharing one with my husband for almost a year. I was squeamish about some things, but this wasn’t one of them. I sat there listening to him taking a leak, trying not to smell it, and heard the harsh metallic noise when he zipped up his pants. Then he yanked the shower curtain back so forcefully he broke half the rings holding it there.

“Whoa,” said Mick once he realized the hairless mess in the fetal position was indeed me. “What the hell?” he didn’t touch me, but I heard the scrape of denim as he knelt down beside me. “Why don’t you have any hair?”

“I don’t _know_ ,” I whispered. I’d come up with a few theories while I walked from the room to the bathroom facility, but things didn’t work the same way here. That’s what I meant whenever I said I was in the land of comic book science: the laws of physics and nature on Earth-1 made no sense. It shouldn’t’ve been possible for Ray to shrink and maintain his density, but he could. It shouldn’t’ve been possible for Kendra to have wings that could be corporeal or incorporeal, but she did. It shouldn’t’ve been possible for a hot spring to restore a desiccated corpse from a decaying body to a livable flesh prison for a lost girl’s soul, but Sara had been resurrected.

Hell, I had gone supernova a few days ago—compared to a physical body radiating the energy of a celestial body without overcharging their earthly particles and spontaneously combusting, losing my hair was a minor weirdness.

That might’ve been why I was losing my hair. I’d probably generated nuclear fusion, then subconsciously absorbed the energy of the nuclear reaction. It was like the blackouts from sensory overload I’d induced when I was adapting to my powers in the months after the particle accelerator exploded, but when a fulgurkinetic metahuman fucked with cosmic radiation, it had similar consequences to ordinary humans undergoing radiation treatment.

I was lucky I hadn’t caused nucleosynthesis like an exploding star. Actually, supernova nucleosynthesis was supposedly responsible for creating oodles of elements, like magnesium and nickel and everything in between them on the periodic table, but that was neither here nor there.

Mick didn’t have the IQ of meat, but he wouldn’t have been able to follow that if I’d tried to explain it all to him. Not with me being so discombobulated. I wasn’t in any shape to give a coherent lecture, and I never thought I’d say that. Also, I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t know. I could’ve been wrong. I was going off what I learned from a high school physics class in a parallel universe and random stuff I’d read in this world. Mostly the publications of in-universe scientists like Ray and Martin, but I digress.

“I’m getting Snart,” Mick told me. Then he left before I had a chance to argue. I made a pathetic noise in protest, but he was halfway down the hallway and he didn’t hear me.

That’s when I made a tactical retreat back to the room and shook the blankets to clear the hair before I made a cocoon. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide—but I didn’t want Len to see me without hair, or eyebrows, or eyelashes. I knew he loved my hair: he liked the incongruously soft texture of the snakelike frizz, he liked throwing off sparks when he stroked my hair, and he liked to pull it during sex. I didn’t have pubic hair and I knew he preferred me with hair down there. I didn’t want him to see me this way. I didn’t want to look at myself. How could he?

Len found me pretty soon after that. I wasn’t surprised. It was in our name, after all. “Don’t panic,” he said in his smoothest voice as his footsteps halted and he crouched in front of me. “Gideon can make your hair grow back.”

I didn’t even laugh at his _Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy_ reference—which he’d made because I’d been reading the series out loud to him before we accepted our mission aboard the Waverider—because I was so freaked out. I squirmed to poke one hand out from inside my cocoon and made shooing gesticulations at him.

Len smoothed his cold fingertips along the inside of my wrist and over my palm teasingly slow before he took his hand off me. “Not until you show me.”

“Len…” I elongated the _eh_ sound in his name until it became an indignant groan, “please don’t make me…”

“Mac,” Len grit his teeth around the consonant at the end and plucked at the blanket over my knees even though I knew he wanted to yank it off me instead, “show me.”

I scrunched my mouth together and made a petulant noise. “Control freak,” I muttered.

“Yeah.” Len quit crouching to sit in front of me so I knew he wasn’t going anywhere. “Control’s my jam,” he deadpanned. “Now show me.”

“Ugh,” I whined and curled further into myself beneath the blanket. “Seriously, dude. I think it’s better for our sex life if you don’t see this.”

Lisa huffed from the general vicinity of the doorway. “It can’t be that bad,” she told me.

“It’s that bad,” I retorted. “I’m basically the bastard offspring of one of the robots from _I, Robot_ and a naked mole rat under here.”

That’s when they both laughed at me—Lisa chortling, Len chuckling—until I stood cocoon and all and walked out. Lisa caught up to me and stepped on a corner of the blanket that was dragging on the floor. I flailed and it slipped off my shoulders. I squawked indignantly and whirled to look at her, my eyes whiting out as lightning flashed along my skin. I was dressed, but I felt naked without my hair to hide behind.

Lisa covered her mouth with one hand to muffle a shriek of laughter, curving her fingers around her chin and jawline and hollowing her palm out to avoid smudging her lipstick. Len reached out to touch my shoulder, but stopped when he saw that I was electrified. I looked down at the floor, but I still felt the weight of his eyes lingering over me.

Len exhaled a short gust of silent laughter. I swallowed thickly and shuffled off to the med bay. I knew he wasn’t trying to be cruel, that he didn’t mean to hurt me when he laughed, but I felt uglier than I ever had and the laughter wasn’t helping.

“Mac,” Len overtook me and tilted my face up when I halted so I had no choice but to look at him, “you’ve survived worse. This?” he mapped the smooth curve of my bare skull with the calloused fingers of his other hand. “This is nothing.”

I closed my eyes and exhaled a stuttering whoosh of air. That’s when he kissed me. Not my lips, but my forehead, unobscured by the bangs I’d had since before I knew he was real. I clutched at the sleeves of his shirt over his forearms to hold him there.

Lisa heaved a melodramatic sigh. “Now I remember why I don’t spend more time with you two,” she told us. “Lenny’s so sweet on you it makes my teeth ache.”

That, and she was building a criminal empire. Hell, she’d only wanted to come on this mission with us because she knew we’d return at the same moment we’d left. No empires would fall while we were on the Waverider. Not unless we stopped at certain points in history.

Anyhow.

I went to the med bay and sat in the chair with my eyes closed while Gideon regrew my hair. I’d known xe could diagnose traumatic injuries and cauterize wounds. I should’ve known xe could make my hair grow back, too. I heard Mick walk into the room to lean against the wall near the doorway, the rustle of fabric when he stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jacket. I opened my eyes after it had regrown past my chin and told Gideon to stop there.

Len cocked his head as he looked at me. “Well,” he folded his arms as one corner of his mouth unfurled into a smirk. “That’s different.”

I side-eyed my hair to see what he meant by that and grabbed a handful when I saw that it was _blue_. Not a light periwinkle blue or a bright cornflower blue, but a dark midnight blue. Almost black.

“Gideon,” I said, “why did you grow it back in blue?”

“I didn’t,” xe said in xyr disembodied voice, “you generated and then absorbed a massive quantity of stellar radiation. It caused a mutagenesis in your epithelial cells that rewrote a part of your genome, changing the genetic coding for your natural hair color. Now instead of eumelanin, the pigment that makes hair black or brown, your genes are coded to produce cyanomelanin, which—”

I was an etymology geek, so I knew what that meant: the Latin _cyan_ originated from the Greek _kuaneos_ , which literally translated as _dark blue_. “That’s what makes it blue,” I deduced.

Neither blue nor green pigments naturally occurred in most animals. Hell, bluebirds made black eumelanin look blue with air sacs in their feathers that created the illusion of the color blue, the same way the gas molecules in the atmosphere scattered light to make a blue sky; but after the particle accelerator exploded, things changed. Bea gave samples to Caitlin after we rescued her from A. R. G. U. S., which made her Subject Thirteen in the Metahuman Genome Project, and she had green pigment in her hair. Not chlorophyll, like a plant, but a new kind of pigment Caitlin had named verdamelanin after she identified it. Now my hair was blue and Gideon had said the word “cyanomelanin” like it was a thing in the future. There was some weird science going on here, let me tell you what.

“Okay,” Len unfolded his arms and waved one hand dismissively, “everybody out.”

Mick walked out, taking his orders. Lisa shrugged, head cocked over her left shoulder, and waved before she walked away. “Bye, Surge.”

I made a garbled noise in my throat. Noriko Ashida, a.k.a. Surge, was a fulgurkinetic mutant in the Marvel universe and a member of the X-Men whose hair was dyed electric blue. I figured Cisco must’ve loaned her trade paperbacks of _New Mutants_ volumes one and two at some point. “Fuck you,” I retorted.

“Love you too,” Lisa told me sweetly from halfway down the hallway. I could hear the smile in her voice, warm and rich as golden honey.

That’s when Len pressed a button to close the door and shucked his jacket. Then he folded it over another chair and smoothly pulled his shirt over his head.

“Um,” I blurted, “why are you getting naked?”

Len closed the distance between us and put his hands on the arms of the chair, leaning over me and giving me a look so hot I can only describe as a _smolder_. I might’ve gulped a little bit. “Take off your panties,” he ordered in that low, intimate voice. “Show me your pretty cunt. I want to see if your hair down there is blue, too.”

I arched my eyebrows at him under my newly grown bangs instead of doing what he’d said. Len fisted one hand in the hair at the nape of my neck and pulled hard enough to make me gasp before he kissed me. It was so intense that my toes curled and I tingled all over, his lips on mine a lovely sort of pressure, the fleshy part of his palm smooth and cold against the nape of my neck. I moaned into his mouth and wrapped my arms loosely around his neck to stroke his short hair while I kissed him back.

Len broke the kiss too soon and nipped my earlobe. “I told you,” he murmured into my ear. “Take off your panties.”

I shivered at the sensation of his breath against my skin and whimpered after he flicked his tongue over the shell of my ear. “Okay,” I told him softly.

I did what he wanted and worked my panties off, lifting my good leg to prop my foot on the armrest. Len knelt and stole them after they slipped off my bad ankle. Then he lifted my skirt up and spread my thighs apart so he could look at me.

“Ugh,” I groaned, “it’s weird down there, isn’t it?”

Len cocked his head and shifted his focus from my cunt to my face. I blushed when I noticed his pupils were blown so wide his varicolored irises were almost blacked out. “I’ve had a thing for people with blue hair since I was a teenager. I like it,” he said fervently as he looked up at me and licked his lips, “you smell _delicious_.”

One of his hands was still on the armrest. I took it and held his hand in both of mine, kissing his knuckles while he smoothed his other hand along my leg into one of the hollows behind my knees. Len kissed and nibbled on the soft flesh of my inner thighs with raw exhales and long, slow inhales. I knew he was smelling _me_ , which should’ve been embarrassing, but it was sexy as hell.

I clutched at the back of his head after he kissed the mound of my cunt, where my pubic hair had grown back in blue. Len squeezed my fingers with one hand and used the other to spread me open, his thumb sweeping back my folds to expose my wet hole. I ached as heat coiled through me and my cunt throbbed with heavy want. I made a soft, desperate noise. Len hummed his approval low in his throat and slowly dragged his tongue up the length of my slit. I moaned as his lips moved over me, kissing and sucking on my folds, making greedy sounds while he licked into me.

Len didn’t tease me, didn’t go slow, or draw things out. Instead he worked two fingers inside me and crooked them to hit my g-spot while he pressed his mouth against my clit and tugged it between his teeth, sucking and roughly sweeping his tongue back and forth over the hard nub. I came so hard and fast I yelped, my hips lurching up beneath his face. Len made another low humming noise of approval. It went straight through me and I came again, two orgasms spooling together until I oozed all over the chair.

I gasped when he slipped his fingers out of me and whimpered as he sucked my slick off them. I was still holding his other hand. Len used our intertwined fingers to his advantage and pulled me against his chest. I stood on tiptoe to kiss his neck, softly. Len moaned for me after I nipped the hollow of his throat and generated a low voltage of electricity down his spine. I escalated by rubbing the hard length of him through his jeans and underwear. Len exhaled a fervent hiss and thrust into my touch, his cock so hard it must’ve hurt a little bit.

“What do you want me to do with you?” I asked him.

Len fisted one hand in the hair at the nape of my neck and tugged hard enough to make me gasp again, holding my gaze while he pulled me down slowly until I was on my knees before him. Then he let go of my other hand and curled his fingers into my hair. “I want you to touch yourself while you suck me off,” he gave me that filthy smirk when I blushed hot and bit my bottom lip, “but don’t make yourself come, hmm?”

I nodded and kissed his navel, then nuzzled the line of dark graying hair trailing down his stomach to his groin as I unbuttoned his jeans. I smiled when I saw that he was wearing the snowflake boxer briefs I’d gotten him for our first Valentine’s Day together, when we were lying low in the Earth-1 version of Poulsbo. I licked the sharp jut of his hipbone while I worked his pants and underwear over his thighs. Len grit his teeth around a moan as I wrapped one hand around his cock. I swept my charged thumb over the vein on the underside of his shaft and felt him twitch as his fingers clutched at my hair. I put my bad hand between my legs while I licked and sucked on his balls, peeling back the folds of my cunt and stroking myself teasingly slow. I swirled my charged thumb back and forth over the head of him until he was slick with precome.

Len pulled my hair as I kissed and licked and sucked my way up and down his shaft. “Mac,” he growled when I finally took him into my mouth. “Look at me.”

I knelt further until I was practically sitting on the floor to change the angle of him inside my mouth and meet his eyes. I held his gaze and hollowed my cheeks out, sucking on him as hard as I could and sweeping my electrified tongue back and forth over the underside of his shaft. I couldn’t bend my arthritic wrist, so I couldn’t make eye contact and touch myself in this position. Not unless I used my other hand. I spread my thighs, switched hands, and teased my aching wet hole as I slipped one slick finger into his tight ass. That’s when Len broke eye contact and blew his load inside my mouth. I swallowed his thick, bitter, salty come and licked up what didn’t go down my throat.

There were no toothbrushes on the Waverider because Gideon cleaned our teeth. I sat in the chair and let xyr do that. I actually liked the taste of his come, odd though it was; but I didn’t want my breath to smell like I’d been giving head.

Len hunched over the chair to kiss me after he got dressed again. I could still taste my arousal on his lips, but Gideon must’ve cleaned his teeth too because his breath was sweet when it mingled with the desperate moan I gasped into his mouth.

“I’m not going to fuck you,” he said with slow vehemence after he broke the kiss, “not right now. I’m going to keep these panties, too.”

“Why?” I whispered. I knew he wasn’t going to fuck me because his cock was flaccid and oversensitized in the aftermath of the blowjob I’d given him, but withholding my panties made no sense. I had oodles of lingerie. Hell, the fabricator could make me more underwear if I needed it.

Len shrugged and smirked at me. “Let’s play a little game,” he suggested, “you go without any panties today and tonight we can do whatever you want.”

I knew where he was going with this game. No one would know I was naked underneath my dress except us. It was about the anticipation, the buildup, and knowing that he’d be thinking about fucking me for hours before he got to touch me.

“What if I put a different pair of panties on?” I asked.

“Well,” Len tilted his head thoughtfully and smirked wider. “Then you do whatever I want tonight, Mrs. Snart.”

I couldn’t tell him no. I was only human, okay?

* * *

I went to strip the bed and do laundry while Len went to watch Mick playing Slapjack with Ray. I checked the pocket in my ginormous purse and found that he’d stolen my deck of cards, probably while I was freaking out about my hair. I shrugged. Mick sometimes took things from me without asking, but he always gave my stuff back, and such a high level of courtesy meant I was special to him. That was good enough for me.

There was a laundry room aboard the Waverider. It was surprisingly primitive, except one compact machine performed the dual functions that required two huge clunky machines in the present. I sat on the floor and I was twenty pages into rereading _Midnight Blue-Light Special_ when someone sat with her back against the wall across from me. I was thirty pages in when I noticed Sara was sitting there. I didn’t have my glasses on, but no one else on the ship had that pale hair—hers was more honey blonde than shiny artificial gold. I squinted and saw her smile unfurl as I unfolded my glasses and adjusted them back onto my face.20

“Hi,” I said as I clipped my bookmark to the page and closed my book.

“Hey.” Sara pointed to my head. “What’s with the hair?”

“Oh,” I exhaled a soft whoosh of air, “apparently I’m not only a metahuman, I’m also a mutant. I now have blue hair wherever hair is supposed to grow,” I flailed my hand vaguely at myself, “Len checked me out.”

Sara exhaled a quiet little snort of laughter. “Your hair isn’t just blue,” she told me with a knowing smile. “You have sex hair, too.”

I was ecstatic that I had hair to mess up, pun unintended. I still blushed. Ugh. “Technically,” I stretched the _y_ sound out into awkwardness, “it’s blowjob hair.”

Sara exhaled a louder throaty laugh. It was a pretty noise. I liked to make people laugh, but especially when I got noises like her laugh in return. “Did he return the favor, at least?” she asked.

“Yeah.” I twisted my fingers together in my lap to give myself something to do with my hands. “Len eats me out all the time, actually. I don’t go down on him anywhere near as much.”

“In my experience,” Sara tilted her head so her long blonde hair frothed over the curve of her shoulder, “with most guys it’s the other way around.”

I shrugged. “I wouldn’t know,” I told her. “I’ve only been with two people: my husband and my rapist.”

I’d given a lot of blowjobs that I wasn’t proud of when I was in junior high, though. I was having dissociative episodes and I had no idea I was mentally ill. I remembered them all as autoscopies, out of body experiences, like watching someone else sucking cock. That’s how detached I felt back then. I didn’t like giving oral because I didn’t feel anything. I’d never felt anything with anybody except Len. That’s why I’d said yes when Dan asked me out. I wanted to feel _something_ , anything, so badly that I tried dating him to see if I could be normal. Or what I thought normal was. Only now I knew my normal was this world, chock-full of weird science and time travel and superheroes and supervillains.

I was on the asexual spectrum, but I was also a metahuman. All of the dudes on Earth-33 were probably the wrong extant subspecies, _Homo sapiens sapiens_ instead of _Homo sapiens metae_. That’s why I’d never been sexually attracted to anybody real in the universe where I grew up. I was biologically incompatible with everybody. That didn’t apply in this universe. Len didn’t have powers, but he did have a dormant metagene. I’d still be sexually attracted to him if I stopped taking birth control. Our hypothetical kids would be metahumans, if what Gideon had told me was true. Malcolm would be fulgurkinetic like me. Zenobia would be cryokinetic like Louise.

Anyhow.

“You were raped?” Sara asked in a soft, deadly voice. I was eerily reminded of Len when her gaze froze over, her mouth flatlining into something fierce and sharp.

“Yeah,” I said, “ten years ago in a parallel universe. It’s not okay, but I’m okay. I survived. I’m not a victim anymore,” I whited out my eyes behind my glasses and met her gaze, “and I won’t ever be a victim again.”

Sara nodded. That’s when she told me about Professor Ivo. What he’d done to her and how he’d manipulated and psychologically abused her in the year she spent aboard the Amazo with him before they found Oliver. I offered to hijack the ship and take her back in time to murder him again. Oliver shooting him twice in the chest wasn’t enough. Sara shook her head and gave me a tiny smile. “I’m good,” she said in a voice threaded with something fragile. Like she didn’t believe that. Not really.

“Yes,” I told her vehemently. “Yes, you are.”

Sara was quiet for a little bit after that. I bit my fingernails until she asked, “Have you ever actually killed anybody?”

I shook my head and cobalt frizz slithered over my cheeks like snakes. “I know you think you can’t go home again,” I said.

That’s why she’d come to Central City to visit her mother after her resurrection. Then she went to Nanda Parbat to see Nyssa. That hadn’t gone very well, so she left Pakistan and went to China to kill a man named Huang Sī Chóu, because she met his daughter Mao through Sin, who’d become a student at her dojo after she moved in with Dinah. Sī Chóu had twelve sons, a daughter, and oodles of children he’d killed because they’d been either biologically female or born in the wrong year. Once he’d been a member of the League of Assassins, but he’d defected a few decades before Sara joined and he’d ended up somewhere in Tibet. Rip found Sara there in the aftermath of her last assassination.21

Sara was emotionally connected to Starling—Star City, now—but after everything she’d done, everything she’d been through, she didn’t think she deserved a home. Or love. Or a family. Not anymore.

“There is a place for you in Central City,” I told her. “Not just with your mother, or Sin, but with us. I know you don’t like my husband—and I think it’s because you’re so alike you see the parts of yourself that you don’t like in him—but he likes you, and he doesn’t warm to just anybody.” I pointed my toes to pop the joints in my feet and muffled a yawn in my palm. “There are so many things I want to set in motion when I get back. If you don’t know where you’re going or what you want after this mission is over, I can give you something to do and somewhere to be.”

Sara was quiet for a longer stretch of time. “I’ll think about it,” she told me softly.

That was good enough for me.

* * *

I spent the whole day without my panties and I couldn’t stop thinking about sex. I was tingly and too hot, I kept clenching my thighs in a fruitless attempt to quiet the sweet ache inside me, and I couldn’t stop thinking about _fucking_. It only got worse once Kendra came to tell us Mick was sparring with Ray.

Here’s the thing: I’d never been particularly interested in shirtless men. Especially when they were hairless. Waxing their chests made them look unreal, like Ken dolls brought to life by weird science.22 I liked the musculature, but that was because I used to draw and nudes were the most interesting subjects for me when I was an artist. Each and every body was different. Each one told a story. I liked to draw in charcoal, particularly vine charcoal, to capture the nuances of the human body in harsh black lines, but sometimes I used softer lead pencils—6B or 7B—when I wanted the sketches to feel softer. I never wore white because when I used to be an artist, I’d get charcoal or graphite dust all over my sleeves from hunching over a drawing.

I would’ve loved to draw Len naked or not, because he was beautiful. I could’ve spent days on just his eyes, or the facets of his back, or one of his hands—but I wasn’t an artist, not anymore. I hadn’t touched a non-mechanical pencil in almost a decade.

Anyhow.

I was neither artistic nor allosexual, so shirtless men were not my jam. Neither was spectating while half naked men punched each other, but that’s where I got my idea for what I wanted to do to Len when I won.

We ate dinner together in the mess hall with Lisa, Mick, Sara, Ray, Kendra, and Jax. (Martin had eaten his dinner earlier and Rip ate every meal alone in the captain’s quarters for whatever reason.) Len touched my leg under the table, the rough pad of his thumb sweeping in slow circles over my kneecap, his calloused fingertips idly stroking the soft flesh where my knee met my inner thigh.

I dropped my spoon when his hand slipped under my skirt. It clattered on the tabletop until I slammed my hand down over the fallen utensil. Sara ducked her head to hide a wide smile that didn’t show her teeth. Jax looked up from his dinner with his mouth full, but he kept eating once he saw that I was okay. Mick had known me for almost two years, and he knew I dropped things sometimes. It didn’t faze him anymore. Len froze and I felt him tense beside me before he forced himself to unclench, to let an old habit left over from living with his abuser for years die slowly. Lisa flinched a little bit at the noise, but smoothed out the hunched line of her shoulders a fraction of a second later.

“Whoops,” I muttered awkwardly.

“You okay?” Ray asked, looking genuinely concerned.

“What happened?” Kendra asked in the same airspace.

I arched my eyebrows as they looked at each other, shared a smile, and then looked away before they refocused on the awkward noisemaker at the table. I pointed to my arthritic wrist with my other hand. “I’m okay,” I said, “my lunate, hamate, capitate, pisiform, scaphoid, triquetrum, trapezium, and trapezoid bones are fused together. That fucks with my ligaments and my metacarpals, so sometimes my hand is spasmodic. I drop things. It happens.”

“They’re doing amazing things with 3-D printers these days,” Ray told me. “If you have one at S. T. A. R. Labs, I can try and print new bones for your wrist when we get back. Caitlin could help me design and engineer artificial joints that are immune to inflammation.”

I smiled at him. I couldn’t help it! That level of enthusiasm was contagious. “This is because you have no money and you’re going to need a job after Kendra murders Savage, isn’t it?” I smiled when he looked sheepish. “I was going to hire you anyway, dude. I need you to figure out a way to make power dampers that are smaller and removable. Maybe bracelets.”

“What for?” Ray asked.

“There are metahumans who want to control their powers,” I told him. “I know a few online who’ve confined themselves to their houses because they’re scared of hurting or killing people. There are others who have claws, or fangs, or scales, or feathers, or horns, or tails. I want to give those people the means to live whatever kind of life they want, but I’m a librarian. I don’t know how.”

Ray gave me a crooked grin. “That’s where I come in,” he deduced.

I nodded. I figured that between him and Hartley, we’d have a prototype soon enough after we returned to the present. “Exactly,” I said.

“That’s my girl,” Len murmured in that low intimate voice. “Always overthinking.”

I shrugged, tilting my earlobe into it. “I don’t think you’d love me half as much if I wasn’t a mastermind,” I pointed out.

Len chuckled and it was enough to make me _throb_ all through my belly and thighs, sweet and fluttering and sharp. “That’s true,” he said in his smoothest voice. “I do love your mind. It’s one of the sexiest parts of you.”

I wasn’t holding my spoon when he cupped me gently under the table, so I didn’t drop it. Len stroked one fingertip into me and swirled it teasingly before he took his hand out from under my skirt and sucked on his fingertip to taste me. I blushed and buried my face in one hand. I doubted anyone else at the table knew he’d done something so obscene where they all could see, but I knew. It was excruciatingly arousing. I was so embarrassed and so into him I wanted to die a little bit.

I tilted my head sideways and nuzzled his shoulder through his sleeve. Our thighs squished together and my bad hand found a home in the crook of his elbow. Len kissed the crown of my head, softly. Then he took my hand in his under the table, his wedding band smooth against the space between my knuckles, the diamond he’d given me digging into his palm.

“Mrs. Snart,” Gideon said in xyr disembodied voice, “your laundry is finished.”

I’d been doing laundry all day, off and on—the bedclothes, my clothes, Len’s clothes, Mick’s clothes, pretty much anything that I’d lost my hair on and/or had smelled like the potential future where everything was on fire—while I finished my book. I went to fetch the clean things from the laundry room and Len was waiting for me when I got back to our room. Gideon had somehow folded everything for me, and I wasn’t going to question it. I left the laundry basket on the floor and lifted my skirt up slowly to show him that I was still totally naked underneath. I felt oddly shy, even though he’d seen me naked so many times before.

Len grinned wide, showing his teeth. “You win,” he said in that low intimate voice. “What do you want me to do with you, Mrs. Snart?”

I shuffled over to him before I turned and flailed my hand at the zipper up the back of the dress I had on. “I can’t stop thinking about fucking you,” I whispered as he unzipped my dress and bent to kiss the back of my neck.

“Good,” Len told me smugly. Then he quit touching me and smoothly pulled his shirt over his head. I didn’t turn around, but I heard him unbutton his jeans and unzip them before he dropped his pants and kicked them aside. “Now,” he murmured into my ear as one of his hands splayed over my flabby stomach, “as the winner of our little game, you’re calling the shots tonight. Whatever you want, Mac.”

I turned in his arms and reached back with both hands to unclasp my bra myself while I held his gaze. “There is something I want to try,” I told him, “for science.”

“Well,” Len gave me that filthy smirk. “If it’s for science.”

I stood on tiptoe to kiss his neck, sucking on the sensitive flesh over his pulse and nipping hard enough to make him moan. “I can manipulate the electrical impulses in the body,” I told him as his hands smoothed down over my waist to grab my ass. “I want to see if I can apply that to sexytimes, but I don’t want to hurt you.” I touched the scars I’d left on his shoulder and nuzzled the gnarled thumbprint on his clavicle with my nose. “That’s the last thing I want,” I whispered to his collarbone, “so pick a safeword.”

“Don’t need one,” Len told me. “I trust you.”

“It’s not about that,” I huffed. “Having a safeword doesn’t mean you don’t trust me. I’m basically going to experiment on you as foreplay. Having a safeword means I’ll know you mean it when you tell me that you want to stop.”

“Then I’ll tell you to stop,” Len retorted, “but you’re not going to hurt me. I can take whatever you’re going to dish out.”

I sighed and exhaled with enough force to flap my lips. “Okay,” I booped his sternum, “but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Len fisted one hand in the cobalt hair at the nape of my neck and hunched to kiss me hard, biting, so I knew my lips would be swollen red when he was done. I wrapped my arms tight around his neck and felt the hard length of his cock twitch against my soft, flabby belly. I kissed him back as his other hand squeezed my ass, greedy fingers curled into my flesh with a lovely sort of pressure while he slipped his tongue into my mouth. I broke the kiss and I was gasping when my heels finally touched the cold metal floor again.

I shifted my weight off my bad ankle and looked at him. “Okay,” I said, “lie flat on the bed and keep your hands behind your head.”

Len tilted his head and raised his eyebrows in a nonverbal _why?_

“I won’t be able to focus if you’re touching me,” I explained, “you’re too good with your hands. It’s distracting.”

Len heaved a melodramatic sigh and pouted because he wouldn’t be able to touch me until I gave him explicit permission. “I suppose I can keep my hands off you,” he said, “for now.”

“Cool it,” I deadpanned. “I won’t make you go without touching me the whole time.”

Len cocked his head in concession before he went to lie flat on his back, doing what I wanted. I took a moment to look at him: the slubs of old scar tissue all over his body, the sharp juts hinting at his bone structure, the facets of the lean musculature under his skin, his salt and pepper hair a mix of more salt than pepper, his varicolored eyes and pupils blown with desire for _me_ , his flat nipples and his big, thick cock a darker shade of brown than the rest of his skin. There was a softness to his stomach, the beginnings of a belly.

Angela Chase was onto something when she said, “you’re so beautiful, it hurts to look at you” about the boy she loved.23 I swallowed thickly as my heart clenched horribly in my chest and made my opening move.

Len grit his teeth and hissed when I crawled onto the bed and straddled him. I opened my eyes to electroreception and took it slow, beginning with his lower extremities and working my way inward. I knew there were minor erogenous zones on the insides of his wrists, and in the hollows behind his knees, but I hadn’t known what using electrostimulation on the bottom of his feet would do. Neither he nor I were into feet, but later Saf explained there were _xuéwèi_ —acupoints—on feet that were particularly sensitive. I didn’t know it then, though, so I turned and looked over my shoulder in surprise when his hips bucked under me and he moaned out loud. I stopped electrifying to watch his chest rise and fall, his mouth open while he exhaled tattered gasps of air.

“Too much?” I asked.

“No,” Len said in a raw voice. “Didn’t tell you to stop,” he grinned up at me, “keep going.”

“Okay,” I said, and I did. Len came after I escalated by generating a current along his spine to his groin, but he didn’t blow his load. I’d known people with penises could orgasm without ejaculating from reading the books my mom used to teach a class on human sexuality. I’d never seen it before, though. I booped the underside of his dick and he made a soft noise in protest. “Oversensitized?” I asked him softly.

Len made a low sound in response, a nonverbal affirmative. “I think it might hurt to fuck you right now,” he told me with a rueful edge to his tone. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” I moved to lie down beside him, snuggling up against the line of his body. “I can wait.”

“Yeah,” Len sighed and took one hand out from beneath his head to wrap his left arm loosely around my shoulders. I hadn’t given him permission to touch me again, but we weren’t doing the electrostimulation anymore, so his lack of submission didn’t bother me. I put my head on his chest and listened to his heartbeat fluttering under his skin. “I love you,” he said with slow vehemence.

I kissed his chest, over where his heart was thumping. “I love you, too.” I squirmed until my head was on his shoulder and looked at him. “So,” I inhaled sharply because I was still aching to get fucked and ignored the heavy throbbing sensation below my belly, “I know you must’ve made a plan for something you wanted to do if you’d won. What was it?”

“Well,” Len murmured, “remember how I asked you to call me ‘Captain’ in bed and you said no?”

“Oh,” I stretched the _oh_ sound out into awkward territory. “So you want to hear me say ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ 24 when you’re inside me that badly? Didn’t you tell me that you hated _Dead Poets Society_?” 25

Mick had taken Len to see that movie when it came out in 1989. Len was seventeen, Mick was twenty-one. Mick cried like a bitch during the scene where the boys got on top of their desks and quoted Walt Whitman at Robin Williams. Len hated the movie because of the boy who killed himself after his father told him that he was forcing him to go to military school, even though he wanted to be an actor. Of course it was abusive, but it was nothing compared to what Lewis was doing to him. Len told me that he was pissed off because he thought the boy was weak. I figured he was even worse at dealing with his feelings at seventeen than he was in his forties. This was confirmed when he said he fucked Mick in the bathroom at the Talon Theatre after the movie, but that was neither here nor there.26

“No.” Len made a disgruntled noise low in his throat. “I really don’t want you to say that.”

I giggled. I couldn’t help it! “How is that different than ‘oh, please, Captain, harder’ or whatever you wanted to hear?” I asked him, still giggling.

Len heaved another melodramatic sigh as his thumb idly mapped the curve of my shoulder. “I regret everything,” he deadpanned. I was still giggling when he took his other hand out from behind his head and fisted it around his cock, giving himself an experimental stroke. I might’ve whimpered a little bit. I would’ve been embarrassed, but I was so turned on I couldn’t _think_. Len chuckled and that sound was enough to make me whine. “I could feel you shaking before,” he told me softly, “you want me inside of you that bad, hmm?”

I moved to straddle him again. I was still in charge, even though I wasn’t electrifying. “Yes,” I whispered.

“Good.” Len grinned and rubbed the head of his cock against my clit to tease me. I made a sharp, desperate sound and shook my hips to grind myself against him. Len grabbed my hair and kissed me hard enough that I felt it everywhere.

I wrapped my arms tight around his neck and stroked his short hair as I licked into his mouth. Len made a low noise in the back of his throat and swept his tongue underneath mine to taste the frenulum there. I shifted my hips again so the head of him slipped inside me and moaned into his mouth as I let gravity do its thing. I’d been aching for hours, wanting him so much it hurt. I came after the head of his cock bumped my cervix. That’s all it took to make me have a screaming orgasm, to make me fall apart in his arms.

“ _Yes_ ,” Len hissed fervently and whispered lowly into my ear, “have I told you lately how much I love fucking your hot, tight little cunt, Mac?”

That must’ve been a rhetorical question, because his fingertips dug into my thigh and he swept his thumb sideways over my clit to make me come again. Len pressed his forehead against mine and grit his teeth around a raw moan while I clenched around him. I was too far gone for dirty talk, but I wasn’t going to make him do all of the work. Not when I was on top. I showed him I was still in charge by inducting a jolt of electricity along his perineum to the base of his cock. Len growled and thrust up into my slick heat so hard I bounced up and down on him. I kissed the corner of his lips and moved my hips to take him deeper, his name messy inside my mouth, an incoherent litany.

Len came inside me with a desperate, guttural noise and flopped onto his back. I took my weight off my sore knees and went down with him. Len kissed my forehead as his cock twitched and softened inside me. I buried a yawn in the hollow of his throat as I tangled my legs up with his.

At some point he’d wrapped his arms tight around me, and I figured he wasn’t letting go anytime soon. That was good enough for me.

* * *

Halfway through the week we spent in space, Ray told me that he’d asked Kendra out. Which was a thing I’d known because I liked to eavesdrop so I had as much information as possible, but it was interesting to hear him tell me about it from his perspective. It was cute to hear him talk about what he’d seen in Kendra over the days that’d passed since we boarded the Waverider, to watch him grin and even blush a little bit. That didn’t mean I wanted him to keep pursuing her, though. I told him as much after he asked whether or not he should try to ask her out again in the future…

…or the past. Yeah, wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey. All that jazz.

“Why’re you making that weird face?” Ray asked, the corners of his mouth spiraling downward in concern. “What’s wrong?”

I hadn’t noticed I was making a weird face until he told me, but I gnawed on the inside of my cheek before I attempted to articulate. “I used to do this thing when I was a teenager,” I told him. “I got crushes on guys that were unavailable or unattainable. I built up these elaborate fantasies in my head about who these guys might be, what it’d be like if we were together, but it wasn’t real. I started exclusively having feelings for fictional characters after I figured that out. I didn’t get crushes on real people anymore.” I’d also ended up married to one of the fictional characters I’d fallen for. Whoops. “I didn’t want those guys,” I clarified. “I just wanted someone to love me. That’s what you want, too. That’s what you lost, when Anna died. I saved her, but she was still dead to you, you still buried her, you still mourned the future with her that you lost.”

Ray blanked so hard it must’ve been forced. “Okay,” he said, “but what does any of that have to do with my feelings for Kendra?”

“It’s not just Kendra,” I told him as gently as I knew how. “It’s Felicity, too. It’s girls who tell you they’re not interested at the beginning, girls you have to stalk to get their attention, girls who’re in love with someone else when you meet them, girls who have over four millennia of history with someone else, girls who lost the love of their many lifetimes ten days ago. It’s heartbreak waiting to happen. On some level you know that’s true. Otherwise you wouldn’t be interested in pursuing a girl you barely know, a girl who just turned you down because she has two hundred and nine lifetimes’ worth of stuff to figure out.”

I knew Savage had killed various incarnations of Kendra two hundred and eight times; but she had to figure this version of herself out, too. Carter had spent two months telling her who he thought she was. Now that he was gone, Kendra had to figure out who she wanted to become. I didn’t know how much she actually remembered from those two hundred and eight lives, but I didn’t want Ray to end up comparing himself to the memory of Carter, or Khufu, or variations thereupon.

“So do you want Kendra?” I asked him. “Or do you just really want someone to love you?”

Ray was quiet for a long stretch of time after that, during which I gnawed off three fingernails. “I have no idea,” he eventually told me.

I awkwardly pressed my palm against his upper arm once, twice, thrice. Ray smiled at me over the slump of his shoulder even though I’d been raining all over his parade. I left him alone with his thoughts and went to scare up some lunch.

* * *

Len crawled into bed with me while I was rereading _Half-Off Ragnarok_. 27 I was so absorbed in the story that I didn’t notice he was there, not until he kissed me. I expected him to escalate and put his hands someplace inappropriate, but instead he cupped my face and kissed me softly, sweetly, surely. I lost my place when I melted into him, my book flopping shut on top of the blankets, my bad hand clutching at his forearm while my other hand fumbled the paperback. Len made a low, satisfied noise in the back of his throat and broke the kiss. I snuggled up against him in the aftermath, once I’d marked my place and put the book out of harm’s way.

“So,” Len murmured, “you want Raymond to work at S. T. A. R. Labs after we’re finished with…” he flailed one hand in a vague gesticulation to indicate our room aboard the spaceship, “…all of this.”

There was something vulnerable in his voice, a sliver of something tinted green. I knew him well enough to deduce that I’d made him jealous by making friends with Ray. That would’ve annoyed me, except I knew his jealous loser tendencies weren’t about me.

I nodded. “Ray doesn’t have any money,” I pointed out, “he’s friends with Cisco, he’s on good terms with everyone else at S. T. A. R. Labs, and he knows that Barry is the Flash. It’s kind of a perfect fit, actually.”

Len grit his teeth around a disgruntled noise. “Was he one of the other fictional men you had feelings for before you knew we were all real?” he asked in his calmest, deadliest voice.

I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it! Despite the inconsistencies of his characterization in season three of _Arrow_ , I saw way too much of myself in Ray when I thought he was fictional to think dating him would end well. Superficially we weren’t at all alike, but he was overzealous and he fell in love too fast and he threw cash around like confetti. I was emotionally invested in him because our personalities were eerily similar. If I’d had money and power and a penis on Earth-33, the Arrowverse version of Ray Palmer was exactly who I would’ve been.

“No,” I wheezed. “Not even a little bit. I know he’s built like a brick shithouse, but he’s basically me with no powers and male privilege. Not what I’m looking for, dude.”

“Yeah,” Len snarked back. “I have no idea why you would want someone who actually gets the obscure references you make, likes the same things you like, and isn’t sexually attracted to anyone else.”

“Okay,” I squirmed out from under his arm and knelt to straddle his thighs so I could look at his face, “where is this coming from?”

“Nowhere.” Len cocked his head and folded his arms. “I’m just being realistic. Rip said we’re not married in the future, and every move we’ve made seems to bring us one step closer to making his future our reality. So when you were talking about paradoxes, that got me thinking. What if this mission creates one of those causality loops and you end up with Raymond, or someone like him?”

Len held my gaze, his varicolored eyes sharp and focused, his jaw set and his mouth flatlined. That’s when I realized he was just as insecure as I was sometimes. Only he got insecure when I was emotionally invested in other people, while I got insecure when he was sexually attracted to someone else.

“Ray and I are friends,” I clarified. “I’m not going to stop being his friend because you don’t like it, but I would _never_ cheat on you. I don’t want anyone else.” I reached out to touch his face with both hands. “I am yours,” I told him softly. “I belong to myself, but every day I _choose_ you. That’s what marriage is. That’s what this love is. It’s my choice,” I kissed him again, harder, and he growled when I dug my fingers into the nape of his neck, “you’re my choice. Don’t ever doubt that. Don’t ever doubt that I love you, or that you deserve it. Don’t ever doubt that we’re going to have the future we’re fighting for.”

Then I shut up and kissed him like I wasn’t going to stop until he believed what I’d said, until he never doubted me again. Len gasped for me and wrapped his arms tight around my waist, pulling me down on top of him and into his lap. I wrapped my legs around his waist and moaned into his mouth before I broke the kiss.

Len closed his eyes and exhaled a harsh, desperate noise. “I love you so much,” he whispered low and raw, “losing you wouldn’t just break me. I don’t want to live without you. I’d kill for you and I would die for you,” he cupped my face in one hand and caressed the flab covering my cheekbone with his thumb, “and if you asked me to stop being a thief, I’d do that too. I’m as much yours as you’re mine.”

I turned my head to kiss the heel of his palm. “I’d never ask for you to stop doing what you love,” I whispered back.

“I know.” Len smiled, one corner of his mouth unfurling before the other like obvoluted ivy leaves on a vine. “That’s one of the many reasons why I love you.”

Then he kissed me again slowly, meticulously, taking his time while pleasure fizzed through my whole body. I kissed him back, lingering and letting myself get totally lost.

* * *

We didn’t leave our room for three days. I figured Len probably left to hang out with Lisa or Mick when I was napping and he wasn’t asleep too, but otherwise we basically spent the waking portion of those seventy-two hours fucking each other’s brains out. After all, there wasn’t much to do in the interim except each other.

I had enough unhealthy snacks to survive for months, but one can only eat so many sunflower seeds before one needs to eat something with more sustenance than salt. That’s how I ended up showering before I went questing for food in one of Len’s black thermal shirts and a pair of bat signal boxer shorts I’d bought at Wal-Mart a long time ago in a universe far, far away.

All my clothes smelled like sex. Actually, the entire room smelled like sex. It occurred to me halfway down the hallway that Gideon probably recycled the breathable air on the ship. I wondered if that meant everyone aboard the Waverider had to inhale the olfactory consequences of our sexcapades.

Apparently not, since it didn’t smell like sex in the mess hall. I didn’t question it. I hunted down the loaf of bread I’d brought—which had dwindled to four slices, two of them heels, because there was a twentysomething dude on the ship and they had stomachs like bottomless pits—and made two grilled cheese sandwiches.

“Where do you get off screwing with other people’s lives?” Kendra demanded to know.

I turned to look at her even though I was in the process of shoving half a sandwich inside my mouth. There she stood with her arms folded, hip cocked, one perfect dark eyebrow arched, and a stubborn edge set into her jawline. I’d upset her somehow. Whoops.

“I’ve been screwing my husband,” I deadpanned. “That’s all.”

Kendra shook her head and tucked her hair behind her ears after it flopped over her face. “I talked to Ray,” she told me. “I thought I could get a drink with him after all, but he said you convinced him it was a bad idea. Like it was your decision!” she scoffed and pinned me with a predatory glare, a bird of prey even with her wings incorporeal. “What gives you the right to decide things for him?”

There were several arguments I could’ve made in my defense. Ray was a grown ass man who didn’t have to take my advice, for one thing. I also hadn’t offered my opinion until he asked for it, and I wasn’t screwing with anyone, either.

Here’s the thing, though: Kendra still wasn’t wrong. I had no right to make choices for other people. I couldn’t rip out the seams of various plot threads and stitch them together again. Hell, I had to stop thinking about things in literary terms. Whatever was going on between them wasn’t a romantic subplot. This was my story, but it wasn’t fictional. Not anymore.

“You’re right,” I told her.

That caught the demigoddess—which was actually an accurate designation, because the Arrowverse version of Chay-Ara wasn’t a Thanagarian like the version of Hawkgirl who debuted in the Silver Age; instead she was the daughter of a mortal woman and Horus, the ancient Egyptian god of the sky, hunting, war and kingship, but that’s another story—off guard.28 “What?” Kendra blurted.

“Nothing gives me the right to decide anything for anyone,” I clarified, “but if you want to know why I think you shouldn’t date Ray, I’ll tell you.”

Kendra snorted. “Okay,” she said in a voice that pitched higher in frustration on the _y_ sound, “tell me why.”

“I’m friends with Cisco,” I began. Kendra broke eye contact and looked at the floor, her mouth pressing into a thin defensive line. “I don’t blame you,” I told her softly, “for breaking his heart. That wasn’t your fault. It was an impossible situation, and I think you made the right choice when you broke up with him. It would’ve been cruel to give him hope. I mean, you only dated for a few weeks and he thought he was in love. If you had asked him to wait for you, he would’ve. Then you would’ve fallen for Carter and things would’ve turned out so much worse for everybody involved. That’s not what I want for Cisco, or you. I think you dating Ray is a bad idea because you started dating Cisco a week after you moved to Central City. Then you flew off with Carter and lived with him, what, six weeks?”

Kendra bit down on her lower lip thoughtfully. Then she nodded, a quick descent of her chin. Later she told me they hadn’t been having the sex during those six weeks because she was demisexual too, but I digress.

“Okay,” I sighed, “you said you loved him. I heard you ask him to come back to you after we buried him. That was less than two weeks ago. I doubt you fell in love with Ray that quickly, and you said ‘no’ when he asked you out. Which you also did with Cisco, actually, but that isn’t the point—”

“What exactly is your point?” Kendra asked.

I sighed and shifted my weight off my bad ankle. “I think you’ve had most of your choices taken away by Savage, or destiny,” I muffled a yawn in the hollow of one palm, “and me taking another choice out of your hands is why you’re mad right now. Not because you want Ray, because you’ve never gotten to choose your own future. Including who you’re going to fall for. I also think four millennia of being screwed over by fate and immortal psychopaths is enough to piss anyone off.”

Kendra slumped when she sighed and shrugged, like a weight had made itself known across her shoulders. “Yeah,” she whispered. Then, a little bit louder now: “You’re not wrong.”29

“So do you want Ray?” I asked. “Or are you mad that in four thousand years on this planet, you’ve never had a choice in what has happened to you?”

Kendra was quiet for a long stretch of time after that—during which I ate three halves of the grilled cheese sandwiches I’d made—before she said: “I remember everything. Every life. Every death. Every time I fell in love. I know who I was as Chay-Ara, but I’ve never really known who I _am_. Savage never gave me the chance, and neither did Carter. I want to be with someone who doesn’t see my past self when they look at me. I want to choose who I love, for once.”

I couldn’t argue with her on that. I was a slut for autonomy. I had a few more points to make, though. “I hate to tell you this,” I said, “but we’re on a time machine. It’s not only possible, but probable, that we’re going to run into a version of Carter because: destiny. I think you should wait to pursue other romantic options until this mission is over to avoid becoming the apex of a love triangle. I also think you should go for someone polyamorous, so you won’t have to choose between your soulmate and whoever else if that happens.”

“I hate love triangles,” Kendra bit down on the harsh _t_ sound in the word _hate_ and wrinkled her freckly nose, “they’re such lazy writing.”

“Yes.” I yawned again, loud and long. “Yes they are.”

* * *

I was rereading _Pocket Apocalypse_ the next day when the arsonist threw a knife at the wall. 30 It was me, Len, Mick, Lisa, and Sara in the cargo hold. Sara was beating the Snart siblings at Crazy Eights using my deck of cards, which had psychedelic multicolored owls on the back. I was reading, and Mick was apparently throwing a tantrum with a side of throwing knives.

I yelped at the noise and dropped my book. “Why?” I squawked as I scooped my paperback up and marked my place with a magnetic pink monster.

“I was recruited for my unique ability to light things on fire,” Mick roared, “and now I’m locked in the one place where I can’t light things on fire: a spaceship!” With that, he stomped over to the doorway to the metal staircase that led to the main floor of the ship.

I sighed. Mick was going stir crazy with nowhere to go, nothing to burn, and nobody to do. In hindsight, I should’ve gone after him to talk him down. Things might’ve been different if I had, but more on that later.

I didn’t have the foreknowledge to see what was coming, so I opened my book again. I’d finished ten more pages when I heard Gideon.

“Captain,” xe said in xyr disembodied voice, “I’ve just intercepted a deep space transmission. It’s a distress signal from the Acheron, she’s the—”

I didn’t hear whatever Rip said to interrupt xyr, because I wasn’t in the captain’s quarters, but I’d heard enough. “Acheron?” I closed my book again. “As in the River of Woe from the Homeric underworld in _The Odyssey_? 31 It’s a trap. It’s totally a trap.” Admiral Ackbar, eat your heart out.32

“Mac,” said Len, “I love it when you make random _Star Wars_ references, but maybe you might want to share whatever you overheard with the rest of the class, hmm?”

“Oh.” I hadn’t noticed I’d been thinking out loud. Whoops. “Gideon intercepted a distress signal from the flagship of the Time Fleet, which is called the Acheron,” I explained, “and given what I know about the mythological Acheron, I think someone is baiting a trap.”

I used my cane to get back on my feet and shuffled over to the doorway. Len stood up smoothly and put one hand at the small of my back to support the shift in my weight as we took the stairs together. Lisa and Sara folded the winning and losing hands to follow us, leaving my deck of owlish playing cards scattered on the floor of the cargo hold.

Rip summoned everybody else to command central to watch the transmission of Eve Baxter, a Bonnie Baxter knockoff and Captain of the Acheron, asking for critical rescue.

“We care about this chick why?” Mick asked in a disgruntled voice.

Rip eerily resembled a pigeon with its feathers ruffled, his hair greasy and unkempt, his brown coat nowhere in sight. “We don’t,” he said in answer to Mick’s question, “but the Acheron’s computer will contain the current intel on Savage’s whereabouts. Gideon,” he leaned over the tabletop, “set a course for the Acheron’s position in deep space.”

“I had no idea we had the ability to explore the unknown realms of the galaxy!” Martin actually bounced a little bit in his excitement about deep space. “Astonishing!”

“No,” Jax retorted. “What’s astonishing is that we’re acting as roadside assistance for the people chasing us.”

Len idly stroked his thumb over the base of my spine through my dress. “Doesn’t it seem suspicious this distress signal just happened to reach us?” he said.

Lisa folded her arms. “How do we know it’s not a trap?” she asked, her tone making it obvious that she agreed with me about it totally being a trap.

“We don’t,” Rip huffed, “but what we do know is that Savage’s trail has run cold, and unless Gideon can upload the data from the Acheron’s computer—”

“I’m in,” Mick interrupted his yawping with a mutter that sounded vaguely ominous, “the sooner we end Savage, the sooner I get back to where I belong.”

“Prison?” Martin quipped.

Mick sighed, his nostrils flaring. “Any prison on earth is better’n this one, professor.”

I shuffled over to sit in the seat opposite from the captain’s chair. Rip took off into the abyss of deep space. I watched as stars flew and fell around us in flares of light, not unlike hyperdrive on the Millennium Falcon in the original trilogy.

Rip invited both halves of Firestorm to join the boarding party, which consisted of himself, Lisa, and Mick. I hadn’t bothered to get up. I didn’t want to board the Acheron. I wanted to see if I could remotely access the data Rip needed from aboard the Waverider.

Len took his partner aside. “Hey,” he murmured, “you think there’s something worth stealing on that ship?”

“I’m just looking for a change of scenery,” Mick retorted. “If that’s okay with you, boss.”

I arched my eyebrows at his tone. Mick wanted to get back to his life in the present with Bea, he blamed his partner for talking him onto the ship, and that resentment had been heating up over the past seven days. It was almost at the boiling point now, but I digress.

“Mrs. Snart,” Rip said, “I leave the ship in your capable hands.”

I blinked in shock, pun unintended. “Why me?” I blurted.

“Because every single piece of advice you’ve given me since this mission began has been sound,” Rip told me, “and you’re the logical choice for a temporary captaincy, given that the team actually listens to you.”

There was something both sorrowful and nostalgic lurking in the undertone of his voice. I figured that meant I reminded him of his wife in more ways than being a bitch when I was hypoglycemic.

“Okay,” I stretched the _y_ sound out into awkwardness. “Thank you.”

Rip nodded, a nonverbal _you’re welcome_ , before he went to board the jump ship with his party.

Lisa flipped her braid over her shoulder with one hand and waved goodbye with the other, a flutter of pretty fingers and golden fingernails. “Ain’t no party like a boarding party,” she deadpanned as she left command central.

Len put an elbow on the armrest of my chair and he was smirking when I turned to look at him. “I suppose we’re both captains now,” he said in that low, intimate voice.

I was smiling when he cupped my face and stole a sweet, lingering kiss. Capt. and Capt. Stone Cold Badass. I liked the sound of that.

* * *

Rip left Martin and Lisa on the jump ship when he boarded the Acheron with everybody else. Jax made a _Star Wars_ reference as they swept of the flagship, and then all hell shook loose while Ray was making _Star Trek_ references from the captain’s chair. I made a garbage disposal noise and slumped in my chair.

“Our boarding party has been captured by Time Pirates,” I said. “Apparently that’s a thing.”

Then, as if on cue, we received a transmission from Valor, the pirate captain aboard the Acheron. “I’d like to speak to acting Captain Mackenzie Snart,” he said.

I shuffled to stand at the head of the table. “I’m Mackenzie Snart,” I told him as I used my powers to access criminal databases from the future through Gideon’s interface, “and you’re John Valor, wanted in six centuries for multiple counts of temporal piracy.”

“I’m also the man holding your crew hostage,” Valor retorted.

“Captain Snart,” Rip said, “I’ve informed Mr. Valor of the fiery retribution that will rain down upon him if we aren’t released immediately.”

I was going to tell Rip to shut up, because tickling the dragon was a terribad idea, but then Valor sucker punched him in the gut and hauled him by the back of his neck until his face was squashed against the screen. I had to force myself not to wince at the impact.

“I’mma make this real simple,” Valor said. “You surrender your ship and I’ll drop you off unharmed at a place and time of your choosing. You’ve got ten seconds to decide.”

“Or else, what?” Ray asked. “If you want the Waverider for yourself, there’s no way you’ll fire on us.”

“Perhaps,” Valor drew his plasma gun, “but right now I’ve got my sights set on your captain’s head. Ten, nine…”

“Why aren’t you doing anything?” Sara asked me, her voice pitching higher in distress.

Theoretically, generating electromagnetic force in deep space might cause any of the nearby stars to collapse. That’s why I wasn’t trying to use my powers against the Acheron. There were too many things that could go wrong if I tried to use fulgurkinesis now, with all of the weird electromagnetic radiation happening in deep space.

“Because using my powers here is a bad plan,” I told her, “do you want a black hole to open and swallow us all? Because I don’t.”

Valor, meanwhile, kept counting down: “…eight, seven…”

“Maybe he’s bluffing,” Ray said hopefully.

“Doesn’t feel like it,” Len snarked back.

“You don’t know the Snarts,” Rip said, “and how they survived the Imperiex onslaught.”

Imperiex was a Superman villain literally nicknamed the Destroyer of Galaxies in the comics.33 Apparently he’d chosen that as a keyword for Gideon to trigger an emergency protocol. I groaned internally when red lights flashed and xe sounded the alarms.

“Uh,” Kendra elongated the sound into freaked out territory, “Gideon?”

“Captain Hunter programed me to execute certain protocols in response to specific keywords,” Gideon informed us.

“What does that mean in English?” Len wanted to know.

“Strap yourselves in,” xe told us, “we are on the move and preparing to fire.”

I groaned externally as the Waverider fired on the Acheron, but that sound was obscured by the gunfire.

“What the hell?” Lisa shrieked.

“Great Scott!” I overheard Martin exclaim in the same airspace.

“What are you doing, Gideon?” Len asked in his calmest, deadliest voice.

“Just a warning shot to let them know we mean business,” Gideon explained cheerily.

“My baby sister’s on that ship!” Len snarled. “My partner, too!”

I was terrified of the possibility that I might create a black hole, but I wasn’t going to let that blast hit us. I changed its trajectory by accessing its interface as Ray told Gideon to switch to manual.

Martin sabotaged the weapons system on the Acheron while Rip triggered another protocol by referencing Kanjar Ro, an alien dictator and enemy of the Justice League in the comics.34 Apparently it activated holographic projection and cloaked the ship.

I sighed and slumped in my chair, again. “Lisa,” I said before I realized they might have the technology to eavesdrop on our frequency. “Golden Glider, come in.”

“I’m here,” Lisa said. “Now tell Lenny I’m okay and that Stein is surprisingly badass. I think our grandfather would’ve liked him.”

Len was clutching at the armrests of his chair, his knuckles bloodless, his nostrils flaring as he forced himself to remember how to breathe. I knew him well enough to know how scared he was.

“Lisa is awesome,” I told him gently, “she wasn’t captured. I think she and the professor are taking the pirates out from inside the Acheron. Rip, on the other hand, got himself and Jax and Mick thrown in the brig.” I slithered along the frequency to the other person my husband was worried about. “Heatwave, come in.”

That was, unfortunately, the inopportune moment Rip chose to hurl oodles of insults at Mick—and suddenly his radio fell silent.

“Oh,” I whispered. “Oh no.”

“Mac.” Len stood to close the distance between us and cupped my face in both hands. “What’s wrong?”

I curled my fingers into the fabric of his jacket over his forearms and exhaled a shuddering whoosh of air. “I think Mick’s going to take the deal,” I told him. “I think he’s going to betray the team.”

* * *

Gideon flew the jump ship with Mick aboard back to the Waverider. Ray, Kendra, Sara, Len, and I stood waiting at the other end of the hallway. Mick turned the corner, his face bloody and bruised, the heat gun still in its holster. I swallowed thickly. This was only going to end one way: not with a bang, or a whimper, but with a contingency plan I’d never wanted to use.35

Len kept one hand on the cold gun strapped to his thigh. “You okay, Mick?” he asked.

Mick turned and looked over his shoulder. “Boys,” he shouted, “the ship’s all yours.”

That’s when the pirates emerged, guns drawn.

“You son of a bitch,” Ray gnashed his teeth around the words in disbelief, like he hadn’t really thought Mick would betray us until he saw it with his own two eyes.

“What’re you doing, Mick?” Len asked in his calmest, deadliest voice.

“Getting us home,” Mick retorted, “are you in?”

I wanted to ugly cry. That wouldn’t help anybody, though, so instead I watched my husband draw his gun and step further into the line of fire. “Yeah,” Len told his partner. “Time to choose a side, I guess.” Len turned back and caught my eye. I held his gaze and nodded. Len gave me a nod in return and turned back to Mick. “Chosen,” he deadpanned and shot one of the pirates in cold blood.

Then, of course, the pirates were shooting back. I ordered everyone to retreat while I electrocuted three of them at once.

“Mr. Rory is making his way to the engine room to access the time drive,” Gideon informed us.

“I’ll handle it,” Len snarled and stepped out of our room.

I screamed when one of the pirates shot my husband in the chest and knocked him down the hallway into the wall. I shuffled into the hallway, my eyes whited out, lightning flashing in bright veins over my skin before I zapped him. I did ugly cry a little bit after Len stood with one hand at his throat, the other holding onto the cold gun. I figured their phasers were set to stun, not kill.

“Don’t ever scare me like that again,” I ordered.

Len shot another pirate over my shoulder and smirked down at me in the aftermath. “Yes, Mrs. Snart.”

I rolled my eyes at him before I turned and zapped two more. That’s when I noticed Ray, Kendra, and Sara had fought their way through the pirates. There were no enemies left, except the one who had been our friend. Hell, he was family. That’s what made this so much worse.

Mick had shot our favorite assassin in the shoulder when we finally got to the engine room. I took her by the arm and yanked her into the hallway. “That’s a third degree burn,” I deduced, “you’re lucky it’s not a fourth degree burn or we’d have to amputate your arm.”

I trusted Len to handle Mick, so I took her to the med bay. Sara didn’t even argue. Oliver being a one-armed emerald archer was enough loss of limb for everyone.

(Oh, the irony.)

* * *

After the team was back on the Waverider and we threw the pirates out of the airlock, we all occupied the captain’s quarters while we decided how exactly to handle Mick.

“Okay.” Ray gesticulated awkwardly, talking with his hands as much as his mouth. “I’ll say it. Why don’t we just drop him off back in 2016?”

“Because our families live in 2016,” Len told him.

“Our sister,” Lisa specified, “…and your sister…” she glanced at Sara, “…and your mom…” she flicked her gaze to Jax before she looked at Martin, “…and your wife. Not to mention,” she side-eyed Ray, “your time-displaced best friend who’s been crashing on Mac’s big ugly couch.”

“Hey!” I pressed my palm flat over my heart in mock outrage. I’d always known Lisa hated that couch. After all, she’d insulted the floral print upholstery the first time she came to my house. It didn’t bother me, because I knew the furniture in her apartment was black leather—and leather seats adhered to your ass like superglue when it was hot out. Not my jam. “I love my couch.”

Lisa heaved a melodramatic sigh. “I know,” she told me indulgently, “that’s why I didn’t have someone reupholster it when you were in another dimension.”

I smiled. Lisa had been spitting mad that I’d left Earth-1 without saying goodbye to her, but she’d given me the silent treatment when I returned instead of having the furniture she hated reupholstered while I was gone. I figured it was because she wanted my house to look the same if—and when—I came back home. Lisa was a little bit better at feelings than her brother, and this was one way I knew she loved me like the sister she never knew she wanted.

“So what are we talking about here,” Jax interjected, “leaving Rory in the brig until we take down Savage?”

“Oh,” Rip said huffily, “no, no, no…the brig is unsuitable for long term incarceration.”

Sara folded her arms. “Giving him free run of the ship is not an option,” she said in a soft, deadly voice.

“I’ll handle it,” Len snarled.

“By handling it you mean murder,” Martin assumed.

“I _said_ ,” Len enunciated the words slowly like he was talking to someone who didn’t know how to listen, “I’ll handle it.”

* * *

I was in bed when Len returned without Mick and wrapped his arms tight around my waist, holding me with his whole body. I was wearing my panties and nothing else. I slept mostly naked because I got cocooned under the covers and overheated if I wore clothes to bed; Len slept totally naked because I kept him warm.

Len buried his face in the space between my neck and shoulder before I reached back to stroke his short hair. “I _hate_ this,” he muttered against the side of my neck.

“I know,” I told him softly. “Bea is going to hate me for this. It’s not just you betraying your partner. I’m betraying my best friend, too.”

“Unless everything goes according to plan,” Len pointed out.

I scoffed, wheezing incredulously into the stale air. “When has anything we’ve done ever gone according to plan?” I wondered.

Two years of history—every choice we’d made, together or apart—brewed in the space between us like a stormcloud. Len didn’t answer my rhetorical question. Instead he held me closer and closer, until I fell asleep with his heartbeat thudding so intimately that I dreamily thought it was pumping blood inside my own chest.

* * *

**Scene III**  
The Hero as Lover 

* * *

Here’s the thing: the state of Oregon was founded as a white utopia on Earth-33. Its constitution—most of which was plagiarized from constitutions of other states—had literally stated that black people weren’t permitted to live there. That hadn’t changed in this universe. It was an ideology most states had shared in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Oregon was just the only state that wrote all of their racist atrocities down.

It was illegal for black people to move to Oregon until 1926, but there was no Oregon Fair Housing Act—which illegalized discrimination against black people buying houses in that state—until 1957. At this point in time, refusing sell a house or rent an apartment to a black person because of their race had been legal a year ago. Hell, in the present day Portland, Oregon was still the most racist city in the country.

That’s why I was worried about both halves of Firestorm. Also because in 1958 the KKK was bombing synagogues, and a pair of little black boys—one seven, the other nine—were not only charged with molesting a white girl who kissed them on the cheek, not only convicted and sent to a reformatory until they’d each turned twenty-one, but also locked up in an underground cell for almost a week and beaten by police officers without access to their parents or legal counsel.36 None of that happened in Oregon, but that didn’t mean Jax would be safe in this place or time.

Len, Ray, Martin, and Rip would be safe in this decade…as long as nobody realized that Martin and Ray were Jewish, or Len was biracial. Lisa, Sara, and I were queer ladies—two demisexual biromantics and a grayromantic pansexual—but we were all white, and they were both able-bodied and conventionally attractive. That meant they’d be safe as long as they didn’t make out with any ladies where anyone might see.

There were aspects of everyone on this mission that would make us all unsafe—blackness, queerness, Jewishness, femininity, disability—but Jax was probably in the most danger. Kendra was in another kind of danger from the intersectionality of racism and sexism that was still a thing in the present—it was worse in the fifties, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t still happening where or when we were all from. Hell, black children were still getting brutalized and murdered by cops. Things had changed a lot in the fifty-eight years between 1958 and 2016, but it was nowhere near enough for anyone who believed in real justice.

Here’s another thing: miscegenation was a fancy word for “interracial coupling,” the legal definition of which included marriage and sexual intercourse depending on what state you were in. Seventeen states had their anti-miscegenation laws reversed by the United States Supreme Court ruling in 1967. Thirteen states passed laws that were repealed between 1948 and 1967. Eleven states had laws that were repealed before 1887. Nine states never passed laws against miscegenation at all.

While the legal definition of miscegenation fluctuated between legal marriage and sexual intercourse, the legal definition of “colored” varied from state to state. Missouri passed its first anti-miscegenation law in 1835, repealed in 1868 during Reconstruction, reinstated in 1890, and finally reversed in 1967. Until then it was illegal for anyone white to marry anyone black or Asian. Washington passed its first anti-miscegenation law in 1855, and it was repealed in 1868. Until then it was illegal for anyone white to marry anyone black or Native American. Oregon passed its first anti-miscegenation law in 1862, and it was repealed in 1951. Until then it was illegal for anyone white to marry anyone black, Asian, Native American, or Hawaiian. Despite miscegenation being considered legal in most states, 96% of Americans opposed interracial marriage in 1958.37

Leonard Lawrence was one of twenty black men who were lynched in Kansas between 1882 and 1968, and he died in the Keystone City riots of 1917.38 Liane Lawrence, his granddaughter, married a white man named Lewis Snart fifty years later in 1967, after interracial marriage was legalized in Central City. Their son, my husband, was born in 1972—when 71% of Americans opposed interracial marriage.

Len could pass for white, but he was black too. There was this other part of himself he’d never thought much about. It made no sense that he didn’t care, didn’t want to know, didn’t need to learn who he was on his mother’s side. Then again, my story had been rewritten too many times. I’d grown up as an anachronism in the wrong universe. There was always something missing. I just didn’t know exactly what it was until I arrived on Earth-1. Now that my biological father had ceased to exist—at least as the version of him that I’d known when I was Rose—I’d never know who my family might’ve been.

Eobard had stolen my history and my future. Len chose not to acknowledge half of his heritage because he didn’t grow up with it, or identify with it. I guess it wasn’t the same thing.

Anyhow.

On the bright side, Savage wasn’t hanging out in one of the twenty-four states where my marriage to Len would’ve been illegal in 1958. On the darker side, we arrived in Harmony Falls on March thirteenth. I figured the universe was fucking with us, cosmically, because March thirteenth was Mick’s birthday.

I waited for my nausea to ebb before I gave the universe the finger. Luckily no one noticed me flipping the ceiling off because we’d time jumped and they had their own side effects to shake off.

“I’m not the only one whose vision is blurry in their left eye, am I?” Martin asked, his voice wobbly.

“Seeing three of everything,” Jax leaned forward in his seat and squinted at Rip, “that’s normal, right?”

“Yes,” Rip sighed, “as I mentioned before, the effect of time travel on the human body increases with the length of each jaunt.”

“Ugh,” Lisa groaned from her seat.

“So,” Kendra asked, “where are we?”

“Harmony Falls, Oregon.” Rip flailed one hand and a black and white photograph appeared on the screen in front of everyone. “According to Captain Baxter’s intel, Savage makes an appearance in this quaint little hamlet.”

There was no town of Harmony Falls in Oregon on Earth-33, but I rolled with the interdimensional fluctuations like a boss. I didn’t get cognitive dissonance anymore. I figured it was because I’d stopped trying to have the best of both worlds.

“What the hell is Savage doing in Pleasantville?” Jax wondered.

“Nothing good,” I deadpanned.

That’s when a newspaper article on a serial killer called the Slasher, accompanied by another black and white photograph of a dead woman with lacerations on her face and chest, appeared onscreen.

“Murder, apparently.” Rip said in answer to Jax’s question. “Several denizens of Harmony Falls have been brutally slain. Others have gone missing.”

“Huh.” Jax side-eyed Len. “Kind of like Rory.”

“Reports are vague,” Rip turned to face us all as the images onscreen shifted to show us pictures of the other victims, “but it seems like the killer is an expert with knives.”

Sara crossed her legs and folded her arms. “That sounds like Savage,” she pointed out.

“Yeah,” Ray frowned at how stark the gore was in black and white, “but serial killing isn’t. Sounds pretty small time for a guy who’s had coffee with Hitler.”

“Well,” Rip huffed, “clearly we have to assume that Savage has a larger, more nefarious plan—”

I’d been staring at the pictures, trying to figure out what looked wrong, when it hit me like a lightning bolt. “Those aren’t knife marks,” I blurted, “see how the gouges are pitted? Those are claw marks,” I glanced at Kendra, “or maybe talon marks. I know you’re a demigoddess because you’re a daughter of Horus, but you had no wings or whatever until you were exposed to the meteoroids with the Nth metal…”

What if, like the kryptonite meteoroids that had fallen in Smallville, the meteoroids that had given Kendra and Carter their powers were mutagenic remnants of the planet Thanagar from the comics?

Len knew me well enough to follow my logic to its unnatural conclusion. “So you’re saying you think Savage has another meteoroid,” he said.

I nodded. “I think he’s trying to recreate the mutagenic process that turned Kendra and Carter into Hawkman and Hawkgirl,” I clarified, “but it’s going horribly wrong.”

Lisa flipped her hair back over her shoulder and looked up at me from her seat. “That’s probably his nefarious plan,” she agreed, “and I doubt he cares that his failed experiments are killing people.”

Kendra covered her mouth in horror. “That’s impossible,” she whispered.

I snorted. “Kendra, you’re a demigoddess with semicorporeal wings who’s been reincarnated two hundred and nine times. Sara literally came back from the dead last year. Ray built a suit to shrink himself and maintain his density, and it works. Jax merges with the professor in mind and body to become a nuclear man. I was born in the future and raised in another dimension where this is a TV show adapted from a series of comics. Now I’m married to a man who has a cryogenic superweapon, and my sister has a gun that makes liquid gold. I have no idea how that works, but it does. This is the land of comic book science. Time travel is real. Metahumans are real. Superheroes are real, and so are gods and monsters. Nothing is impossible. Not anymore.”

Nobody spoke for a long stretch of time after that, until Rip eventually cleared his throat. “Ms. Saunders and the late Mr. Hall were exposed to meteoroids which fell to earth four thousand years ago. Savage finding a meteoroid with similar properties in the nineteen-fifties is still a bit far-fetched.”

I arched my eyebrows at him until he looked away. As if that was more “far-fetched” than a demigoddess who bled tiny seed pearls, or the Firestorm matrix, or Cisco seeing through the vibrations of the multiverse. Psh.

“Mac hasn’t been wrong yet,” Sara told him with a sharp edge lurking under the nonchalance of her tone.

“Yeah.” Ray folded his arms. “What happened to ‘every single piece of advice you’ve given me since this mission began has been sound’?”

There was another long stretch of silence, during which I thought about telling Sara how wrong I was about how to approach being a part of this world. Instead of disempowering Eobard as soon as I theorized that I was capable of doing it, I let people die. I didn’t ask Len not to kill anyone. Instead he murdered three men the day he became Captain Cold and he ate me out for the first time the morning after that.

If anyone was to blame for metahumans being a myth in 2046, it was me. I knew about the pipeline. I knew what kind of world Barry would create by othering his own kind, and I didn’t stop him. I could have taken over S. T. A. R. Labs while he was still comatose. I could have changed _everything_.

I thought about trying to fix that mistake by going back in time, but I didn’t want to make things worse by accident. I figured I’d have to do my best after I returned to the present. Until then, it was time to accomplish our mission.

“Well,” Rip huffed and puffed and blew the awkward silence away, “since we’ve jumped back in time, Savage isn’t expecting us here.”

“Savage is pretty good at hiding,” Kendra pointed out, “even in a small town. So how do you plan to find him?”

“By investigating these murders,” Rip explained. “There has to be a common link between the victims, starting with the first: a piano teacher was slain in her home, which is now on the market. Dr. Palmer, Ms. Saunders, you should pose as a married couple—”

“No,” I shook my head slowly, “interracial marriage has been legal here for about seven years, but this is still the most racist state in the country and segregation is still enforced outside of the public education system. I’m assuming you want the neighbors to talk to whoever goes undercover as a Stepford wife, but I’m assuming it’s a white neighborhood and they won’t talk to her if they can help it.”

Rip made a frustrated noise. “Then you go with Dr. Palmer,” he suggested, “you won’t need to fabricate a disguise, given that you seem to wear dresses that would fit right in during this decade.”

I looked down at my dress: bright blue fabric festooned with white polka-dots, big white buttons on the bodice, and a wide white belt around my waist. It wouldn’t have looked out of place in 1958. “Fifties aesthetic, yes,” I deadpanned. “Fifties attitudes, no.”

“Mac is _my_ wife,” Len told Rip, “she’s not going anywhere with Raymond.”

I might’ve argued, if I hadn’t been thinking about how to hide my hair without dyeing it. I figured it was short enough that I could fabricate a cloche to hide my bangs and match my dress.

Lisa heaved a melodramatic sigh. “I volunteer as tribute,” she said, “if Kendra comes with us. I can pretend we’re sisters or something, and she can keep me from stepping on the good doctor.”

Ray grinned crookedly, like the idea of Lisa stepping on him wasn’t so bad.

“Dr. Matt Miller was found murdered on the grounds of the asylum where he worked,” Rip continued huffily, “the sanitarium is in need of a replacement. Meanwhile,” he leaned over the tabletop as yearbook photographs of six teenagers appeared onscreen, “Mr. Jackson is the perfect age to discern the facts behind the disappearance of the three teenagers who went missing a week before these murders began.”

“Um,” I blurted, “you’re sending a twenty-year-old black dude out alone to talk to white teenage girls in 1958? Do you want him to get killed?”

“How about we team up?” Jax suggested before Rip could do more than make another frustrated noise. “That way if anybody tries to kill me, you can zap them or something. Cool?”

I nodded. “Cool.”

“So,” Len unfolded his arms and gently took my bad hand to idly play with my fingers. “Raymond is shacking up with my sister, who’s pretending Kendra is her sister to mess with racist housewives, Sara is Nurse Ratched, the professor is Dr. Spivey,39 Jax is the new kid in town,40 and Mac’s going to give anyone who tries to hurt him a nasty _shock_ ,” he bit down around the consonant and narrowed his eyes at Rip. “Where does that leave me?”

That’s how he ended up pretending to be an F. B. I. agent. Ray actually pouted when he found out Rip and Len were going undercover as G-Men, but he got over it once he made himself useful by unpacking the boxes of clothes Lisa and Kendra had fabricated to add a semblance of authenticity to their move.

I couldn’t see Lisa react when the realtor implied that Kendra was a maid, but I knew her well enough to hear the cyanide that lurked under the artificial sweetness of her voice when she said they were sisters. Then she implied they weren’t biological sisters, but sister-wives. I snorted so hard I slumped over the table in the diner I was eating lunch at with Jax, Martin, and Sara. Don’t judge me.

At least I hadn’t noticed any signs outside the diner. No _Whites Only_ or _No Coloreds, No Dogs_. Nobody had made Jax go through a separate entrance or asked him to sit in the rear end of the building. Apparently whoever owned the diner wasn’t enforcing segregation. Whoopee!

Martin had been talking while I eavesdropped, and he kept talking while I wheezed. “Seeing white picket fences and perfect family houses…” he smiled at a pair of boys riding their bicycles past the diner window. “It’s enough to make one nostalgic.”

Sara frowned, the space between her eyebrows scrunching up when she side-eyed him. “Or nauseated,” she retorted.

“Oh, come on, Ms. Lance!” Martin said, “even someone as jaded as yourself can’t deny how idyllic this time was.”

“Yeah,” Jax watched a pair of white boys passing by the window as one of them gestured and shook his head at the idea of a black guy eating with a white guy and two white ladies, “if you’re white.”

“And a man,” Sara chimed in. “And straight.”

“And able-bodied. And neurotypical,” I added my two cents. “And conventionally attractive. And Christian. Did no one tell you that you were going to hell for being Jewish? Because my niece and nephew got that a lot in grade school. And since they’re only a year or three younger than me, people were spewing that nonsense at the turn of the century.”

“Okay,” Martin slumped back in his seat. “Okay, I get your point.”

“Dude,” said Jax, “even if this time wasn’t full of small-minded idiots, it’d still be creepy as hell.” Then he leaned over the table like he was about to tell us a secret. “I used to watch all these old horror movies with my mom,” he told us in an ominous whisper, “and they all started off in places like this. See, first it’s all perfect, and then BOOM! Some alien monster beast thing starts killing kids on Lover’s Lane.”

Sara grinned at me. “Ooh,” she intoned with a giggle peeking out through her mockery.

“I’m telling you, man!” Jax flailed a little bit. Then something—or someone—caught his attention.

“What is it?” Martin asked.

Sara peered at the girl stabbing her sundae with her spoon at the counter. “An unhappy cheerleader,” she quipped, “now that is scary.”

“That girl was from the newspaper articles Rip showed us,” Jax deduced, “she knows the guys that went missing.”

“Betty,” I told him softly, “her name is Elizabeth Seaver, but people call her Betty, and Thomas Fuller—Tommy, her boyfriend—is one of the missing boys.”

“Perhaps she can illuminate us as to their whereabouts,” Martin postulated.

“Dude,” Jax said, “can you not just ask me to go talk to her and find out what she knows like a normal person?”

“Okay,” Martin retorted petulantly, “why don’t just you go do that?” Then he looked at the time, checking his wristwatch after he put his hat back on. “Alright,” he adjusted the brim above his glasses, “we mustn’t dawdle. I believe our lunch hour is nearly at an end. Come along, nurse.”

I didn’t like the way he drew out the sibilant in the word _nurse_. “Rude,” I deadpanned.

Sara finished her coffee—black, with two sugars—and made no move to leave the booth. “Just so you know,” she told the professor, “Ra’s al Ghul taught me how to kill someone slowly…” she stood and slid out of the booth with the deadly grace of a highly skilled assassin, “…over the course of _days_.”

That’s when she left the diner with Martin dogging her steps awkwardly, while Jax went to talk to Betty. I smiled when he suggested that she dip her fries in his milkshake, despite being grossed out by anything strawberry flavored that wasn’t actually a strawberry. I eavesdropped on Lisa, Kendra, and Ray while Jax stood up to a pair of racist jocks. Apparently his bravery in the face of bigotry impressed Betty enough that she asked him to hang out tomorrow night. Jax said it was a date, and that was that.

Meanwhile in the ambiguous house of bigamy, Kendra was teaching Lisa the Argentine tango and Ray was trying to pick his jaw up off the floor. I giggled and dipped one of my fries into my own milkshake as I swapped frequencies, only to overhear Sara lowkey flirting with one of the nurses.

Lindsey Carlisle introduced herself to Sara as they toured the asylum, but that wasn’t the interesting part. Savage was using the name Curtis Knox in this decade. Which made me laugh so hard I almost coughed up a lung, because that was a _Smallville_ reference.

Here’s the thing: I was born in 1991 on Earth-33. I was ten when the first season of _Smallville_ aired in 2001 on the WB, one of the four channels I got on the TV set up in the playroom I shared with Kel. It had a twelve inch screen that had seemed huge back when I was a fifth grader, but I digress. _Smallville_ wasn’t my gateway into the DC universe—that was _Batman Beyond_ , which started airing in 1999, the year of the Y2K problem and my parents finally getting cable TV—but I watched every week. I kept watching after the WB merged with UPN in 2006 to create the CW, the network on which all three Arrowverse shows had aired in the reality where I grew up.

I had issues with _Smallville_ , like I had issues with the Arrowverse. I still ugly cried whenever I rewatched “Absolute Justice” and Lois broke the story of the Justice Society of America.

Anyhow.

Dean Cain, who’d been Clark Kent on _Lois & Clark_, was an immortal Vandal Savage knockoff in season seven of _Smallville_ —they couldn’t use Savage as their antagonist, because his character was apparently off limits for some reason.41 Contrariwise, our version of Dr. Knox was actually Savage, and he was Head of Psychiatry at the asylum.

“Oh,” I whispered just as Jax scooted into the booth across from me, where Sara had been earlier. “Oh no.”

Jax frowned at me. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

I sighed in a futile attempt to unclench. “Savage has free reign of the asylum,” I told him softly, “and in this era they lobotomize people willy-nilly.”

“Savage with an asylum full of mental patients with no power to keep him from hurting ’em just because he can,” Jax muttered. “That’s awful.”

I heaved another sigh and scooted out of the booth. “Worse,” I said. “There’s nothing we can do about it. Sara met a nurse, who told her that Dr. Knox left the asylum early because he and his wife are throwing a dinner party tonight, and she doesn’t know where her boss lives.”

Jax gave me a look so comically gaping I could only describe his expression as _gobsmacked_. “Savage is _married_?”

I nodded. “Apparently her name is Gail and she’s ‘lovely.’” I tucked my cane in the crook of my elbow to make air quotes. “I think the nurse has a crush on Mrs. Knox.”

“Okay,” Jax held the door for me and fell into step beside me as we walked back to the Waverider. “That’d be cute if her husband wasn’t an immortal psychopath.”

According to Gideon, in three months Gail Knox and Lindsey Carlisle would move in together and be misconstrued by their neighbors as a widow and a spinster. Later, they’d be mentioned alongside Alice James and Katherine Loring in the Earth-1 version of _Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay Histories and Cultures_ as a more contemporary example of a Boston marriage, but that’s another story.

* * *

I returned to our room to find Len in a suit and a turntable on the desk, playing an Ella Fitzgerald record that wouldn’t drop until 1959. “I don’t remember much about my mom,” he told me over the music, “but I remember her favorite song.”

I propped my cane against the wall and toed off my orthopedic shoes before I took off the hat, clawing my fingers through my hair and inducting tiny sparks that I snuffed out in midair. Ella was singing about beginner’s luck as I put my hat down on the desktop.

Len caught my hand and pulled me into his arms, so our bodies met with a crush of superfluous fabric in between us. It did nothing to cool the heat in his eyes. I wrapped my arms tight around his waist, one hand mapping the distance from the base of his spine to the hollow between his shoulder blades, the other rubbing his lower back. Len curled his fingers into my hips and squeezed with a lovely sort of pressure. “This isn’t our song,” he murmured, “but it does remind me of us.”

Ella was singing about the first time falling in love, and getting lucky. I doubted Gershwin had meant it euphemistically when he wrote the song, but I didn’t care. I’d seen him in a suit before, at our weddings on both worlds and before I knew he was real; it had worked for me then, and it was working for me now. “Take off your hat,” I said, “please.”

Len tilted his head, thinking it over, and then he smirked. “Only if I get to wear you like a hat instead,” he said in that low, intimate voice.

I blushed, and nodded. Len smirked wider and took one hand off me so he could put his hat on the desktop next to mine. I unbuckled the belt around my waist and unbuttoned my dress. Len peeled the wide straps of the dress off my shoulders, his fingertips lingering on the words inked along my right shoulder, his thumb sweeping over the fresh slub of scar tissue from the bullet that had grazed my left arm.

I knew he liked blue, so I’d fabricated vintage lingerie to match my new hair. All dark blue silk and black lace, with a high-waisted garter belt attached to a pair of thigh-highs, but without the iconic fifties bullet bra because that wasn’t my jam. I also knew that he hadn’t stopped worrying about Mick since the night before. Hell, I was worried about him, too. If our timeline was still in flux, then we’d probably created a divergent timeline in which we didn’t return for Mick the moment we’d left him behind. That version of Mick was dead, or worse. I wanted to stop thinking about it, and being with him was the best way to do that. Hence the lingerie and my strategy of going straight for the sex as soon as I got back on the ship. I figured we could talk in the afterglow, but I digress.

Len dragged his gaze up from my stocking feet to my head and made a low humming noise of approval. “Hello, Mrs. Snart,” he grinned and smoothed his hands up from my waist to feel me through the flimsy silk, “so pretty, so soft, so perfect, and you’re all _mine_.”

I might’ve made a soft noise that sounded like _eep_ when he lifted me onto the edge of the mattress, but I got ahold of myself and stopped him when he moved to loosen his silk tie. “Leave the suit on,” I said, “please.”

“Sure.” Len unhooked my bra with one hand and tugged the straps over my arms until the undergarment joined my dress on the floor. I grabbed his tie and pulled him down to kiss him hard, my other hand clutching through his short hair as I cradled the back of his head. Len cupped my breasts and swirled his thumbs over my nipples in slow circles. I broke the kiss and tugged my lower lip between my teeth in a futile attempt to muffle a whimper. Len kept teasing my nipples, flicking them roughly as he gently nibbled on my earlobe. “You’re so cute,” he whispered lowly into my ear.

“You’re not so bad yourself,” I whispered back.

Len chuckled and spools of pleasure coiled through me when he kissed my neck. I moaned his name as his kisses moved from my neck to the tops of my breasts, then lower. “Oh,” he flicked his tongue over my nipple, “I can be _very_ bad.”

I snorted at that before he sucked my nipple into the heat of his mouth and took his time teasing the hard nub with his tongue. Len rubbed my other nipple between his thumb and forefingers, the rough callouses on his fingertips making me tremble, and blew a puff of cold air onto my oversensitized areola. I whimpered as he sucked on my other nipple and sparks flew out from my fingertips, flittering over the fabric that framed his shoulders before they burned out.

Len knelt and swept his thumb over the yellowed old bruise on the inside of my left thigh. Time was in flux, and so much had happened nonlinearly since he’d bitten me two weeks ago. It felt so much further in the past. I thought being a Time Master must’ve been exhausting for people who didn’t go rogue and steal a ship. Overstuffing slices of time—days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries—into the space between seconds. I couldn’t imagine living on borrowed time.

“That’s not what I want,” I thought out loud.

Len stopped nuzzling my belly to look up at me. “So you don’t want me to go down on you?” he glanced down at the telltale slick that had darkened the silk crotch of my panties before he met my eyes. “Who are you and what have you done with my wife?”

I rolled my eyes at him. “Not what I meant,” I huffed. “I know you aren’t just in this to steal things. Not anymore.”

I smoothed my hands up from his shoulders and touched his face to show him that I wasn’t mad after he looked away. Len exhaled sharply, one of his hands covering my fingers and squeezing gently as he kissed the heel of my palm. I smiled when he met my eyes again, the look he gave me raw enough to make my heart clench horribly inside my chest.

“I don’t want to keep doing this after we end Savage,” I told him softly. “I miss my library. I miss my friends. I miss our _home_. I can’t stay on this spaceship forever. Cool?”

“Cool.” Len tangled his other hand in my hair and rose to kiss me as gently as he knew how, still with a hint of teeth when he bit my bottom lip before he broke the kiss. “I want to end Savage for everything he’s done or will do,” he bit down around the word _end_ to add a dash of vehemence to what he was saying, “including what he did to you. I told you that you made me want things I didn’t want before. Like wishing I could take back some of the things I’ve done. Like being a better man, the kind of man that you deserve.”

I snorted again. I couldn’t help it! “No one is better for me than you,” I retorted, “and it’s not my job to redeem you with my love or whatever. I’m not saying it’s easy to love you—it’s not, because you don’t _tell_ me when you feel insecure or unworthy—but you’re the best man I’ve ever known. Don’t try to change the past to become something you’re not. Do better in the future because that’s what you want, not because that’s what you think I need. I love _you_ ,” I booped his nose, “all of you. Don’t ever imply that you’re not good enough for me again. I will kick your ass. Don’t think I won’t.”

“Noted.” Len untangled his fingers from my hair before he got on his knees. “Now,” he hooked his thumbs under the waistband of my panties and yanked them down over my thighs, “I’m going to eat you out before Rip inevitably shows up and tries to get me to go through the case files with him for the fifth time. Unless you’re not in the mood.”

“I’m a slut for emotional intimacy,” I deadpanned. “Now stop talking and fuck me.”

Len grinned, baring his teeth in a bright glint of white framed by his perfect mouth. I flopped onto my back and gasped as he stroked the flat of his tongue up and down along the length of my slit. Teasing me with little swerves in between my folds, soft flicks edged with rougher licks and sucks. Nuzzling my clit while he fucked me with his tongue, the obscene slick noises of him eating me out accompanied by the greedy humming sounds he made in the back of his throat. That _thrum_ jolted up along my spine and my back arched, my toes furling and unfurling, the crepitation obscured by a cacophony of loud, explosive moans.

“Hng,” I whined after my third consecutive orgasm and squirmed on top of the sheets. Len chuckled and took his hands off me. I heard the metallic _click_ and slide of him unbuckling his belt, and then he scooped an arm around my waist to pull me flush against his chest, so I was sitting on the edge of the mattress when he thrust all the way inside me. I could feel the crisp material of his shirt and a line of mellifluous silk beginning at his throat. There was metal in his watch, his cufflinks, his shoes; his belt buckle that clinked with every intense thrust, his wedding band and pinkie ring. I put my stocking foot on his shoulder to change the angle of him inside me so he hit a spot that made my whole body ache sweetly.

Len kissed the crook of my neck and buried a guttural moan there as the aftershocks of my orgasm clenched around his cock. “You’re so _tight_ ,” he growled into my ear.

“You made me come really hard,” I retorted breathlessly. “You should know that’s how this… _ah!_ ” I moaned when the head of him bumped my cervix and my hips pitched up against his without my permission, “...works by now. You’ve had more sex than me.”

“That’s true,” Len grit his teeth around the consonants while he did something with his hips that made me gasp as pleasure surged through me, “but it wasn’t _this_ , wasn’t…” he groaned and exhaled heated and heavy against my clavicle as his cock twitched inside me, “…it never felt like this. I was never in love before. Not like I am with you.”

I cradled the back of his head and kissed his mouth, tasting myself in the slant of his lips on mine. Len made a raw sound, a gasp trembling all through the column of his throat as his thrusts got sloppy and shallow, like he wanted to stay inside of me as long as he could last. I unspooled again and moaned his name between kisses, softly. That’s all it took to undo him, to make his knees buckle when he came.

Len kissed my forehead and crawled into bed without me while I went to wipe his semen off. I was all for hanging out in the afterglow, but I didn’t want to stain my stockings. I took the garter belt off, winced at the angry red groove it left in the flesh of my waist, and rolled my stockings down. Len made a low humming noise of approval. I rolled my eyes at him over my shoulder, but I was smiling where he couldn’t see.

I got back in bed after I put on a shirt and a clean pair of panties. Len took my hand and intertwined our fingers, his palm smooth and cool against mine. I smiled all over again and told him: “I love you, too.”

Len exhaled a soft pleased flare of sound, one corner of his mouth unfurling before the other so the grin he gave me was crooked. “Oh,” he narrowed his eyes and flattened his grin out into a frown that furrowed the space between his eyebrows, “abnormally large feathers were found at every crime scene, but they weren’t collected as evidence. So the sheriff is probably in cahoots with Savage.”

“Ugh,” I groaned, “getting the sheriff’s department in his back pocket is the perfect way to keep killing with impunity in a small town. Of course they’re in cahoots. Why didn’t I think of that?”

Len shrugged. “I’m sure you would’ve if Rip made you go through the case files four times,” he muttered.

I giggled at how caustic his tone was. I knew better than to ask whether he’d told Rip that he was a little bit dyslexic. Hell, I didn’t know about his dyslexia until we’d been together for almost six months. I had to promise to find the Castle Northmoor cache with him so he’d tell me. I didn’t like the outdoors enough to share his enthusiasm for geocaching, so our dates sometimes involved me eating a picnic lunch and watching him hunt for caches from my wheelchair. I’d bring the duplicates of unicornos—vinyl toys shaped like bigheaded unicorns that I got in blind box purchases—to replace whatever was in the caches when he found them. Len even had an app to decrypt the hints on one of his phones, but I digress.

“Okay,” I huffed, “does Rip just not want to believe I’m right? I know assuming Savage has a mutagenic Thanagarian meteoroid is far-fetched, but it’s not more outlandish than anything else we’re dealing with.”

“Well,” said Lisa from the doorway, “it’s certainly not more outlandish than an immortal psychopath being our neighbor. Surprise, bitch!” she folded her arms and her hip cocked under the full, flared skirt of her shirtwaist dress. “Savage lives across the street.”

“Of course he does.” I fizzled out on the sibilant and sighed. Despite the _American Horror Story: Coven_ reference, I wasn’t surprised at all. Not even a little bit. Seriously, it was difficult to stop thinking about my life in narrative terms when things were always so contrived.

Len gave her an incredulous look. “Are you wearing _pearls_ , Sis?” he asked.

“Yeah.” Lisa splayed her fingers over the hollow of her throat and rolled her eyes, lingering melodramatically on the ceiling before she grinned at her brother and me. “I think the good doctor has a thing for Donna Reed.”

I was vividly reminded of that episode of _Gilmore Girls_ , in which Lorelai and Rory mocked the _Donna Reed Show_ and Dean got upset because he thought the oppressive stereotype of perfectly coiffed women cooking and cleaning for their families all day every day was “nice.”42

I’d taken a History of Television class in undergrad—I’d originally registered for Research Writing, but they cancelled that class because the only person who registered was me—where we did a unit on how fifties sitcoms contributed to the shaping of that decade by creating a feedback loop between those narratives and the way real people behaved. After all, “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life” and whatnot.43 I blamed Lucille Ball, whose awesomeness made everyone want to get into their own shenanigans and force CBS not to cancel _Star Trek: The Original Series_ , but I digress.

I finagled a more comfortable bra on and a skirt I’d fabricated with an owl appliquéd above the hemline, instead of a poodle. At some point Len had put his dick back into his pants. I figured he’d cleaned it off beforehand—pun unintended—because he didn’t want to stain his boxer briefs. I thought about telling him that boxer briefs weren’t invented until the nineties, so his underwear was an anachronism, but I knew he wouldn’t care. I figured I’d save my fun fact for later, when I could use it as an excuse to get him out of his clothes again. Don’t judge me.

“Savage doesn’t think I recognize him,” Kendra was explaining when we entered the captain’s quarters. “Which means he won’t try to kill me—”

“Because he can’t steal your powers until you’ve found them,” Lisa interjected, “but that doesn’t mean he won’t kill me. Or the good doctor. Or anyone else who gets between you and him, for that matter.”

Kendra side-eyed Ray, who’d been stuffing his face with tuna surprise that Savage had given them. “Are you really eating that?”

Ray shrugged. “Say what you want about Savage,” he scooped another forkful out of the dish, “he makes one hell of a casserole.”

I flopped into the armchair beside Rip’s desk and tucked my cane between the cushion and the armrest. Len smoothly folded himself onto the other armrest and took one of my hands in both of his to idly play with my fingers. Lisa stood between us and Kendra, her arms folded underneath the cups of her historically accurate bullet bra. I’d managed to avoid wearing one, but my sister wasn’t so lucky.

“Yes. Well,” Rip flipped one of the case files closed. “Mr. Snart and I have been analyzing these forensic files—”

“Which revealed nothing,” Len interjected, “except that Savage is _very_ good at making people disappear.”

“That’s something you both have in common,” Jax muttered pointedly.

Kendra glanced over her shoulder to give him a significant look, her eyes going wide in warning. Len flicked his gaze to Jax. I squeezed his fingers, wondering if I should tell Jax about our plan; but I didn’t want Rip to know about Saf, so I kept my mouth shut.

Jax leaned forward in his seat, his feet tapping low on the floor in case he had to move quickly. “Are we just gonna pretend like none of this ever happened?” he flailed, talking with his hands. “That Mick Rory wasn’t part of our team? If you can just ice your best friend like that, I hate to think what you could do to us.” Then he turned and shook his head at me. “I don’t understand how someone like you ended up married to someone like him.”

“Don’t you _dare_.” I spat the words out with sparks that flared in midair until I snuffed them out. “I’ve had it up to here,” I flailed my hand above my head, “with you people judging me for my marriage. Len is a criminal and a killer, but he’s also the kind of person who’d sacrifice a man who’s been a significant part of his life since he was a teenager to protect a bunch of ungrateful douchewaffles he met a few weeks ago. Hell, we get into shootouts with redshirts almost every time we leave the ship, and I didn’t hear you complaining about my family killing people at the arms bazaar or the blood cult murder house in 1975, or the Soviet prison in 1986, or dystopian Star City in 2046, or when we all murdered the pirates by shooting them off into the abyss of deep space. Never mind that your nuclear blasts cause radiation sickness. Which is sometimes fatal.”

That’s why Ronnie and Martin had been living on the streets after the particle accelerator explosion: because the professor was afraid of poisoning someone, like his wife Clarissa.

Jax quit judging me for my romantic choices and looked down at the floor instead. I exhaled with enough force to flap my lips. “Len isn’t here to steal things,” I said, “he’s here so you can all sleep at night knowing there’s somebody on board capable of killing so you don’t have to.”

“Wait,” Ray swallowed another bite of tuna surprise. “Did you call us ‘ungrateful douchewaffles’ just now?”

I nodded. Len snickered and held my gaze while he kissed my knuckles, a nonverbal _I love you_. I smiled at him without baring my slightly crooked teeth in a nonverbal _I love you, too_. Lisa unfolded one arm and chortled into her palm, muffling the word _douchewaffles_ as her shoulders jittered.

“Right now we need to focus on the mission,” Kendra told us softly, being careful with her words.

“Look,” Rip exhaled an exasperated noise. “Savage is going to be busy with his little cocktail party,” disdain oozed and dripped from every syllable of the words _cocktail party_ when he spoke, “and whilst you three keep an eye on him, Sara and Martin will have the opportunity to find out whether or not Mrs. Snart is right about what he’s doing in the secret wing of that asylum.”

Sara, at that moment, was having a drink with the lesbian nurse. I neglected to mention that. Lisa, Kendra, and Ray returned to their house after they fabricated vintage eveningwear. Rip left the case files on his desk, opting to figure out another point in time where Savage might be instead. I couldn’t decide whether that was pessimistic or practical.

I was reading in bed when I overheard Kendra say, “fate is a prison. When free will is gone, what’s left?”

Savage, with a creepy smile that was audible in his voice over the radio, said: “Destiny.”

“Kendra,” I whispered after he went to answer a phone call about the alarms that had gone off at the asylum, “it’s okay. You’re going to stab him thirty-seven times in the chest. That’s his fate.”

Ray laughed from elsewhere in the Knox house. “‘Carl,’” he elongated the short vowel sound in a quiet falsetto, “‘that kills people.’”

Kendra laughed in spite of how terribad the situation was. “‘That’s what forgiveness sounds like,’” she whispered back, “‘screaming and then silence.’”44

I wondered if she’d watched _Llamas with Hats_ before or after she started dating Cisco. Probably before.

Len glanced at me as he unbuttoned his shirt. “What’s going on?” he asked.

I tugged my bottom lip between my teeth when he shucked the shirt and dropped it into the laundry basket I’d brought on board. “Savage is being a creeper,” I told him. “Ray can’t pick a lock to save his life, and Lisa stole a bottle of _Comtes de Champagne Rosé_ she plans to open at home in the present after we kill ourselves an immortal psychopath.”

“What an unexpected turn of events,” Len deadpanned.

I giggled and marked my place when he crawled into bed with me in his boxer briefs and nothing else. “Oh,” I tugged at the waistband of his underwear as one of his hands splayed over my hip, “these aren’t historically accurate. I don’t think you should be wearing them.”

Len smirked and grabbed a fistful of my hair as his other hand smoothed over my hip to squeeze my ass through my panties. “I think my hands are a little busy right now,” he told me smugly.

That’s when I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed him thoroughly, drawing a low moan out from the back of his throat. Len kissed me back and pulled my hair just hard enough to make me gasp into his mouth.

At some point his boxer briefs ended up falling over the edge of the mattress and onto the floor.

How unfortunate.

* * *

Lisa, Kendra, and Ray spent most of the next day spying on Savage. Ray shrunk down to sneak into the secret room and found the dagger I’d stolen for Kendra when we were in 1986 inside a locked box in 1958. Len hotwired a car so I could follow Jax on his date, in case the jocks who’d gotten on his case for talking to Betty decided to try their luck. I killed the lights and parked an inconspicuous distance away once they stopped on Lover’s Lane. Sara, meanwhile, flirted with the nurse for information and freaked out a little bit when Lindsey kissed her.

“What’s wrong?” I asked as she fled the scene of the makeouts.

“I just…” Sara heaved a sigh before she attempted to articulate, “ever since I got brought back to life, I haven’t experienced much in the way of feelings…and then, when Lindsey kissed me…”

“Calm your tits, Canary,” I quipped, “you met her yesterday.”

Sara snorted. “It’s not like that,” she told me softly, “kissing Lindsey made me realize I have feelings for Kendra.”

“Oh,” I blurted. I had no idea how to respond to that. Kendra had a soulmate and an ongoing flirtation with destiny, and she was probably the most complicated option Sara could’ve picked. I thought this wasn’t going to end well. I thought wrong, but more on that later.

“Yeah.” Sara exhaled sharply. “See, that’s the thing that _sucks_ about feelings: you realize how much you could hurt someone,” I heard her footsteps slow to a staccato beat I might’ve been capable of keeping up with, “or get hurt.”

“Okay,” I stretched the _y_ sound out awkwardly, “how do you feel about polyamory?”

Sara exhaled a spurt of incredulous laughter. “What? Why?”

That’s when I noticed the jocks had, predictably, come to try their luck after all. “Sorry,” I told her as I got out of the car, “it’s time to give these fucktrucks the shock treatment.”

Sara snickered into my ear while I tapped the jock who thought grabbing Betty was acceptable. I zapped him after he let go. Jax sucker punched the other jock in the stomach once, and again.

That’s when a monster swooped out of the sky and shrieked triumphantly as it, or he, clawed the jocks to death. I yelped and flailed as Jax practically dragged Betty into the passenger seat before he tried to start the car and failed epically.

“Mac!” Len shouted over the radio with worry vibrating along the frequency with the tenor of his voice. “What’s wrong?”

I zapped the monster when it—he—landed in front of the hood and shrieked again. “I was right,” I told him. “It’s a mutant hawk monstrosity that’s been killing people, not Savage. Whatever meteoroid he found must’ve fused with elements from other planets in between here and Thanagar or something. I don’t know, but I bet Gideon could tell me for sure.”

That’s when the sheriff arrived. I didn’t know whether he was in cahoots with Savage or not, but I wasn’t going to risk it.

Betty got out of the car after I zapped him. “Who are you?” she yelled, halfway to tears. “What are you?”

“It’s okay,” Jax told her, “she’s a friend.”

“It’s not okay!” Betty wailed, “she killed Tommy!”

“I didn’t,” I retorted, “he’s knocked out. I don’t know how Savage did this to him, but Gideon can probably reverse the process.” I shuffled around to look at Jax. “I think we should take him back to the ship.”

Betty shuddered with a sob that shook her whole body and made a soggy, broken sound. “What?” she asked.

Jax stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jacket to keep himself from offering comfort that she didn’t want. “It’s a long story,” he said.

That’s when Betty turned to bury her face in Jax’s sleeve over his shoulder and burst into tears. It must’ve been overwhelming to find out your missing boyfriend was a monster who’d been slashing people to death for months. I didn’t blame her. I would’ve been crying too.

Betty had calmed down a little bit by the time Len and Rip arrived to extract us. Rip eyed the monster on the ground, whom I’d had to zap again when he woke up, and then at the sheriff. “It seems you both had good reason to be concerned for Mr. Jackson’s safety,” Rip told me and my husband.

“Yeah,” Len snarked back, “sucks being right all the time.”

That’s how we ended up back on the time ship with a pair of teenagers from 1958. Martin took samples from Tommy to see if his mutation was curable. After he and Gideon made the antidote and it worked on him, it was time to storm the castle.

Sara offered to back Kendra up after she suggested that seducing Savage might be the best way to catch him off-guard enough to kill him dead. Sara was working that night as a nurse, Rip disguised himself as one of the orderlies, Ray pretended to be a mental patient, and we—the snit of Snarts—broke into the secret wing so Martin could give the antidote to the other two missing boys Tommy had told us were being held prisoner there.

Savage sounded the alarm when Kendra attacked him. I zapped the monsters he’d loosed and they flopped anticlimactically to the ground, wings spread all willy-nilly. Martin injected them both with the antidote and we took the meteoroid with us when we left the building. It went shockingly well, pun unintended.

Unfortunately those weren’t the only people who’d been exposed to the meteoroid. Savage had experimented on two girls who’d been friends of Betty’s, and Sara cut their attempted takeover of the asylum tragically short. There were a few slashed up inmates, but no casualties. Ray backed up Kendra while Sara fought the mutant girls, and blasted Savage through the window of his office with a blast from his vambrace. Kendra grabbed the dagger that Savage had taken from her off the floor before they retreated into the hall. Martin injected the girls with the gene therapy he’d devised and they faded back to their pastels and poodle appliquéd skirts like it had never happened.

Savage escaped while we cleaned up his messes and got the hell out of dodge. Kendra apologized for thinking she could end an immortal psychopath by herself. Ray handwaved that malarkey, and told her instead that next time we’d all have her back. Sara was looking at Kendra with a soft curve in the corners of her lips, the simultaneously hopeful and fearful smile of someone with a crush.

I fell asleep as soon as I got back in bed. Lisa dragged me out to breakfast the next morning while Ray packed up the house with Kendra and Betty sped off into the sunrise with Tommy in the new car Jax had bought for them. Sara stopped by the asylum to say goodbye to Lindsey and then met us there at the diner in the aftermath. I overheard Jax apologizing to Len, telling my husband he wasn’t a monster. That was something I wanted him to keep hearing from people who weren’t me. Maybe someday he’d listen.

Chronos attacked the ship while we were walking back through an inch or so of snow. I’d gone radio silent, so I didn’t overhear anything until it was far too late to stop the events that had been set in motion.

“1958 is swell and all,” Kendra said, “but I miss the internet, and cell phones.”

I giggled, then stopped cold and watched the Waverider try to leave without us. I didn’t _think_. I fluxed the geomagnetic field and flew up into the troposphere. Lisa shouted my name, but it was lost to the airspace I’d occupied before I tried defying gravity. I felt Ray follow me into the stratosphere as I tried to paramagnetize the entire spaceship to keep it from leaving us behind.

I screamed in pain and the sky swallowed the sound. It was like being torn apart from inside my skull, like Athena splitting the head of Zeus to emerge a grown ass woman in full armor. I must’ve blacked out, because I woke up drooling on Lisa’s shoulder in the backseat of a stolen car.

“What happened?” I asked, groggily.

“You flew too close to the mesosphere,” Ray told me. “You almost died.”

“I know you love my jerk brother so much it makes everybody sick,” Lisa said, “but do you have to be so melodramatic about it? Other people want you to stay alive, you know.”

That’s when it hit me: Len was _gone_. Len had flown off into hypertime without his sister, without _me_. I whimpered, and then I forgot how to breathe.

I was hyperventilating when Ray said, “Seriously, don’t try to kill yourself. Nothing is worth your life. Not even love.”

I shook my head slowly. “I wasn’t,” I snapped. “I haven’t acted on the suicidal thoughts I sometimes have since I was a teenager.”

Quiet stretched out to fill the negative space, until Sara spoke. “I thought about drowning myself,” she murmured, “before Nyssa came for me. After everything with Ivo on the ship, and on the island with Ollie and Shado and Slade…I thought, what’s the point? Why should I stay alive?”

Kendra nodded and looked at us in the rearview mirror. “Carter and I talked about killing ourselves in our past lives so Savage couldn’t steal our powers,” she told us softly, “but we never did because we didn’t know whether we’d be reincarnated after we committed suicide.”

I thumbed the slub of old scar tissue on the inside of my wrist. It wasn’t long enough to scream _I got this by attempting suicide_ at anyone who looked, but I had tried to kill myself once. I was thirteen and I hadn’t read _Gray’s Anatomy_ or taken a biology class yet, so I didn’t know enough about my circulatory system to cut my wrist the right way. I’d cut horizontally instead of vertically, and I’d stopped after half an inch of cutting because it _hurt_ like a motherfucker. I’d failed at many things in both worlds, but in this instance I was glad I was a failure.

“Okay,” Ray said, his voice pitching higher with worry that clenched along his jawline, “stop talking about killing yourselves. No one else is going to die today.”

“Len isn’t dead!” I hadn’t meant to yell, but I did it anyway. “Gideon told me that we have two kids in the future. I’m not pregnant, so there’s no way he’s dead. It’s not possible,” I shook my head to shake off that possibility, “and if he is, I have a chronokinetic friend in the present. I won’t let him die. I _won’t_.”

“How exactly do you plan on getting back to the present?” Sara asked.

“I don’t _know_ ,” I huffed, “but I’ve driven from one world to another before. I doubt time travel is more difficult than interdimensional travel. I can figure it out.”

* * *

**Scene IV**  
The Hero as Emperor and as Tyrant 

* * *

Ten days later, I hadn’t figured it out.

We’d driven to Seattle and bought a house in Ballard, the same weathered brick one where I’d lived on Earth-33 until my younger brother was born and we moved across the water to Bainbridge Island. Lisa had kept the duffle bag of cash I’d given her during what I’d called Operation Cleaver. We had approximately a million dollars, a fortune in 1958.

Boeing had basically taken over the Emerald City during World War II. Seattle had an economic boom in the aftermath, so population density skyrocketed between the nineteen-forties and the nineteen-seventies. New suburban houses spawned neighborhoods and communities as the city put down roots like a green, growing thing. Ballard was its own city, a smaller annex of Seattle itself.

I went to Salmon Bay Park. I’d gone there almost every afternoon when I was a toddler and played in the sand pit while my sister or our parents had a picnic on the grass. I’d brought Len there in the present on Earth-1 before we were married. Mick had pushed me when I went on the swings, pushed me high enough that my stomach tried to escape from my body through my throat.

Ray cannibalized all of the small appliances that came with the house to build a transponder, in case the Waverider had returned to Harmony Falls in the meantime. Sara and Kendra were spending more and more of their time together as the days slipped into weeks. Lisa infiltrated the Colacurcio crime family and spent most of her time laundering money for them. I kept getting weird glances whenever I left the house because my hair was blue, so I stopped going out after a while. I ugly cried in the shower every morning. It wasn’t just missing Len. It was that I thought I’d lost everything all over again. I thought wrong, but more on that later.

* * *

Ten weeks later, I still hadn’t figured it out.

Kendra had gotten a job at the Ballard Carnegie Library and persisted in having unresolved sexual tension with Sara when they went grocery shopping together, or bought their beds together, or played a board game while Ray tinkered with the transponder and I made dinner.

I’d gone through withdrawal from my antianxiety medication and my antidepressants during our sixth week in 1958. I was overdue for an infusion of immunosuppressants and I knew my ankle was going to get so inflamed that I wouldn’t be able to walk at all. I was also terribad at sleeping alone, so I tried to sleep in the same bed as Lisa, who slept crosswise and didn’t like to share her space. I ended up sleeping with Ray in the literal sense of the phrase, because I figured Sara and Kendra were going to start sleeping together both literally and figurally and I didn’t want my codependent ass getting in their way.

Ray finished the transponder and it caught on fire after he tried to activate it. “I just have to fix a few of the kinks,” he insisted, “the next version will be much less explosive.”

Sara slumped and made a disgruntled noise. “I thought you said you were going to ask Mac to say something to him,” she said to Kendra.

Kendra gave me a guilty look. I knew her well enough at this point to know it was a nonverbal apology. I’d known Sara didn’t want to stay in one place and we’d still put down fragile roots by getting jobs and buying furniture and whatnot. I should’ve known this wasn’t going to end well.

“Say what?” Ray asked.

“Your beacon.” Sara raised her voice as she crossed the room to stand in front of where they stood and I sat. “It’s a waste of time because they’re not coming back. It’s not because the Waverider is broken, or they’re lost, or they can’t find us, or whatever. It’s because they’re dead,” she caught and held my gaze as she said the word _dead_. “Snart is gone,” she told me softly, “and the sooner you accept that, the sooner you can move on…” she turned and walked back to the other side of the room, “the sooner we can all move on.”

“So what,” Ray said, “we’re just supposed to give up?”

Sara whirled to face him. “On being rescued? Yeah!” Then she grabbed a bag she’d packed and left in the corner by the door a few weeks before.

“Sara,” Kendra said her name softly, desperately, and my heart fell to pieces all over again, “what are you doing?”

“I can’t stay here,” Sara told her, “I need to find somewhere I belong.”

“Nobody in this house belongs here,” I retorted, “but rejoining the League of Assassins isn’t going to make you feel at home. Not when Nyssa won’t exist for twenty-seven years.”

Sara ignored me. “Savage is still out there,” she told us, “don’t draw undue attention onto yourselves.”

“Sara,” Kendra said her name again. That was it, and it wasn’t enough.

“Look,” Sara turned to face us framed by the doorway, “you guys have each other. Most people, in any time period, aren’t that lucky.”

I didn’t tell her that she could have us for as long as she wanted. Sara had forced Nyssa to release her from her oath to Ra’s al Ghul, and she was never truly going to believe she belonged anywhere else until she went back to where she’d come from.

I, of all people, understood that.

* * *

Ten months later it was 1959 and I hadn’t gotten out of bed in months, except to do my lady business or get another book to read. Kendra brought me new reading material from the library every week and at night she’d tell me the stories of her past lives, because she worried she might lose those memories if she didn’t talk about them.

That’s how I learned she was Mary Wollstonecraft in a past life. Apparently she “emerged” when she jumped into the Thames after Gilbert Imlay left her during the French Revolution and she met William Godwin, her soulmate in that lifetime. I’d thought Mary Wollstonecraft had died in childbirth, but Savage had killed her after her daughter—Mary Shelley, the teenage girl who invented science fiction when she wrote _Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus_ —was born. William Godwin outlived her, remarried, and lived for almost forty years until Savage found him.

Mary Wollstonecraft died in 1797. William Godwin died in 1836. At some point in the 1830s or 1840s they’d probably reincarnated, but that’s another story.

Anyhow.

I switched from sharing a bed with Ray to sharing a bed with Kendra sometimes because I kept waking up with his morning wood and that was just awkward. It got exponentially more awkward when he tried to kiss me one night. I squawked and dropped my cane as I tried to get away. It clattered onto the kitchen floor with a hollow, metallic sound.

“WHAT THE FUCK?” I shouted at him.

“I’m sorry!” Ray took a long step back and held up his hands in mock surrender, “I thought—”

“I’m _married_.” I bit down vehemently around the word. “I don’t know what’s worse, that you think I’d cheat on Len with you, or that you’d cheat on the girl Anna told me you started dating in the present after you decided not to get back together.”

“Norma ghosted me a week before we left 2016,” Ray flailed and talked with his hands as much as his mouth, “and it’s not cheating if your husband is dead.”

Norma Brawler was a nonbinary AFAB person who used female pronouns and who’d written a biography about Ray after he supposedly died. Apparently he wanted to meet her because he liked what she wrote, one thing led to another, and the cup of coffee he’d offered to buy for her became the beginnings of a relationship. Anna had told me they’d been dating for about a month before we left, but I digress.45

“Len is _not_ dead,” I snapped, “and you’re falling for an emotionally unavailable woman. _Again_. Seriously, how aren’t you seeing the pattern here?”

Ray snorted. “All I see is that I have a thing for powerful women,” he told me. “Two demigoddesses, a self-made genius and a hero in her own right, and then there’s you. One of the strongest people I’ve ever met. I don’t know how you’re still standing after everything you’ve survived, but you are, and I—”

“If you tell me that you love me,” I warned him, “I will kick your ass. I’ve spent the past ten months second-guessing myself because I’m scared my plan to get back to the future won’t change the past, but I can’t live like this anymore. I hate myself. I hate it here. I hate falling asleep next to you because you’re not the man I love. Lisa is stealing a schoolbus for me as we speak because I’m going to open a wormhole tonight and we’re going to drive back to the future.”

“You can open wormholes?” Ray arched his eyebrows at me. “Since when?”

“About two years ago.” I heaved a sigh in a futile attempt to unclench and bent to scoop my cane up. “Ray, you’re one of my best friends,” I told him as gently as I knew how, “but I’m not going to indulge your codependency anymore. I should’ve known you’d take me being terribad at sleeping alone the wrong way. That’s my bad. I was being selfish, and I’m sorry.”

Ray smiled. It was lackluster, but at least he tried. “Don’t apologize,” he said. “You told me that sharing a bed would be strictly platonic. I’m the one who got his hopes up that someone I wanted might actually want me back.”

I heaved another sigh and shifted my weight off my throbbing ankle. “Somebody is going to love you so much,” I told him softly, “romantically, sexually, intellectually, heroically, and that person will be your partner in your work, your mission, and your life.” I thumbed a facet of the blue diamond set into my engagement ring. “I’m that person for Len and he’s that person for me,” I swallowed thickly, “I think loving him ruined me for anyone else.”

That’s when Kendra stepped into the kitchen to tell us Lisa had parked the schoolbus in front of the house. It took us most of the night to pack, all told—packing always took longer than anticipated—but eventually we’d crammed everything of sentimental value we’d accumulated between 1958 and 1959 on the schoolbus.

I stretched my brain out into the atmosphere. Instead of siphoning power from underground, I stole it from a thunderstorm brewing far, far away. There was weird lightning that struck in the mesosphere above thunderclouds in the troposphere. I converted that energy into a wormhole that burst open in the street like overripe fruit sliced by a serrated kitchen knife, kernels of temporality spilling out like seeds from a pomegranate.

“Okay,” I tucked my cane between my legs and crossed my ankles, “seatbelts, everyone.”

“There are no seatbelts,” Kendra said, her voice pitching higher with anxiety when she noticed that.

Lisa hit the gas, and drove us back to the future. Marty McFly, eat your heart out.

* * *

We left Seattle on January twenty-fifth, 1959. We arrived in Central City on January twenty-fifth, 2036. I’d overshot by two decades, but since it was my first time opening a wormhole to travel through time instead of between parallel universes, I called it a win. I absorbed the energy from the wormhole to close it, so there wouldn’t be a breach from one century to the next…

…and felt a bolt of speedsters coming from miles away.

“Oh,” I whispered. “Oh no.”

Five blurs slowed down until they looked human: four women and one boy, gangly in a very teenage way. One of the women was all red except for a pair of yellow eyes, flashing with lightning. I’d seen that face before in the pages of a comic book.

“Sela,” I said, “you’re the Flash.”

One of the women blurted out a startled, “Mom?”

I recognized that voice, even though it had gotten a little bit huskier since its owner was nine. “Rose,” I smiled at her, “you called me ‘Mom.’”

“This is Watchtower,” I heard someone say over the radio, “come in, Surge, Flash, Quick, Impulse, Tornado.”

“Leo,” Sela didn’t bother to use their codename, “it’s Mom.”

“Leo?” I said, “Who’s Leo?”

Here’s the thing: the timeline was constantly in flux. There were a lot of unnecessary twins in the comics and their myriad adaptations. Most of those had either vanished in the womb, the same way nine in ten pregnancies that had started out as twins did, or they became genetic chimeras in our version of Earth-1.

Dawn Allen was an intersex woman and a genetic chimera because she fused with her twin brother in utero. Dawn and Don Allen—the spawn of Iris West and Barry Allen—had been the Tornado Twins in the comics. Dawn was Tornado in this version of the future. Jai West, son of Wally West and Linda Park, was Impulse. Irey West, his twin sister from the comics, didn’t exist.

Harry had another daughter with Patrice Swift, a tour guide at the Central City Museum who’d unwittingly shown Len where to find the Kahndaq Dynasty Diamond when he went through her walking tour twice. Joanne Swift was a speedster like her half-sister Jesse had been, or would be.

Sela had become the Flash, taking up the mantle of her great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. Rose didn’t take her codename from the Surge in _New Mutants_ , she’d inherited that mantle from one of her grandmothers, a trans woman named Luca Loletti from the Wildstorm continuity in the comics.46

Len and I weren’t just going to have two kids. Leonora Snart was our kid, too. Apparently they inherited the codename Watchtower from me, because I had helped—or would help—Batman create the communications network the Justice League used during their heroics.

I ugly cried when I realized that meant Len wasn’t dead. I stopped crying when I accessed the S. T. A. R. Labs network and found my death certificate. Then I kept looking and found them all.

Mackenzie Snart. Leonard Snart. Lisa Snart. Francisco Ramon. Ivana Ramon, née Molotova. Bartholomew Allen. Joseph West. Wallace West. Linda Park-West. Jesse Wells. Harrison Swift. Patrice Swift. Beatriz da Costa. Michael Calhoun. Joan Calhoun, née Williams. Saffron Doyle. Luna Nurblin. Anna Choi. Raymond Palmer II. Jerrie Palmer, née Rathaway. Hartley Rathaway. Axel Walker. Mark Jackham, formerly Mardon. Juliet Jackham. Shawna Baez. Brie Larvan. Felicity Smoak-Queen. Oliver Queen. Thea Queen. Nyssa al Ghul. Sara Lance. Cynthia Lance. Dinah Laurel Lance. Helena Bertinelli. Barbara Gordon.

Bruce Wayne.

Clark Kent.

Diana Prince.

I stopped after Wonder Woman, but there were hundreds of thousands more.

All dead in Central City circa 2021 because we’d failed to accomplish our mission to kill Vandal Savage.

* * *

Lisa drove the schoolbus to S. T. A. R. Labs, where Caitlin and Iris waited for us. Caitlin’s red hair was graying in thick streaks she wasn’t bothering to hide. Iris looked like she hadn’t smiled in years, but then she smiled and said, “Hi.”

“Hi,” I said, the word inflating between us like it could fill in the cracks I’d left in this world by failing everyone. Including myself.

Caitlin gave me a hug before she went to hug Ray and Kendra and shockingly, without hesitation, Lisa too. I smiled despite myself when she froze in shock, then melted into the embrace like there was nowhere else she’d rather be.

There were people in the cortex that I didn’t recognize: Joshua Jackham, a dark-skinned man in a black leather jacket, a green t-shirt, and dark jeans whose fingers threw off sparks when he mussed his long black hair. Antimony Thawne, a girl whose hair was a poisonously bright shade of blue. Flannery Calhoun II, who snuffed out a flame in her palm to wave. Winifred Barlow, a fulgurkinetic metahuman who’d killed her abusive father with her powers when she was nine years old.47

Josh was Mark and Julie’s son. Antimony was Eddie’s daughter with a nonbinary AFAB metahuman named Jenet Klyburn, whom he’d gotten pregnant before he started dating Iris.48 Flan was Mick’s daughter with a woman who wasn’t Bea. Freddie was a girl whose mother had been imprisoned in the metahuman wing at Iron Heights by Barry, and whose father had gotten full custody in the aftermath.

Barry assumed that putting a criminal in prison meant his job was done. Apparently in her case he’d made a terrible mistake, but more on that later.

Iris introduced us all to the people we hadn’t met yet and told us everything that had happened in the past two decades to give us context and spoilers, hoping that we might change the future when we returned to the past, before she took us down to where the pipeline had been. It had become a hall of memorial statues, the heroes who’d fallen in 2021 immortalized in stone.

I stopped in front of the statue of Captain Cold and reached out to touch his face, the smoothness of his jaw set in stone the wrong texture, the goggles obscuring his eyes. No sculptor could’ve done those eyes justice. It suited this future, though. After all, there was no justice here.

“What happened to Savage?” Ray asked. “If he came to kill us, why’d he stop before we were all dead?”

Caitlin gnawed on her lower lip until it disappeared between her teeth. “Louise,” she told me softly, “after he killed Jesse, she froze Savage and took his body, and she’s been Killer Frost ever since.”

That’s when I started crying so hard I couldn’t speak. Lisa put an arm around my waist and hunched to bury her head in the crook of my neck, her tears falling onto the neckline of my dress. Our sister, who played the violin and wanted to romance all of the ladies in _Dragon Age: Inquisition_ and loved pineapple on her pizza, had become a coldhearted monster.

“I won’t fail,” Kendra said in a voice that was half sharp weapon, half deadly calm. “I won’t let this happen.”

“Yeah,” said a sarcastic male voice from the other end of the memorial hall, “I’ve heard that before.”

Here’s another thing: Tobias Jacobs was a trans dude, Lisa’s half-brother from her mother’s second marriage, and a metahuman capable of using his empathic abilities to cause people immense pain. Louise had gotten close enough to ice Savage because he used his powers to torture the immortal psychopath who’d killed us all.

I’d been talking to him online since I returned from Earth-33. I hadn’t known he was Lisa’s half-brother, because Lisa didn’t know and neither did Toby. I learned that he was going to murder his abusive father because the asshole was hurting his younger sister.

Two metahuman children had been forced into situations where they had to use their powers in self-defense against their abusers. One of them had been put in that situation as a consequence of Barry’s actions, while the other lashed out when the abuse escalated to the point that his sister was being hurt instead of him.

I’d let it all happen. I could’ve changed everything, but I didn’t. I was as much at fault for the way people saw metahumans as Barry was.

I wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my sweater and turned to look at Toby. “I’m sorry,” I told him.

“Yeah,” said Toby. “I’ve heard that before, too. Doesn’t change anything.”

* * *

We split up after that. Lisa had gone looking for Louise. Kendra went to visit Carter and Aldus’s graves. Ray stood in what had once been Cisco’s workshop for a long time, looking at a stream of photos set on a loop. I decided to bite the bullet and went to meet my kid.

Leo looked like Len: the pale brown skin, the black hair swept back in a bun that converged like an angry thundercloud, the varicolored eyes in shades of blue and gray. All they’d inherited from me were their freckles, the button nose they were splotched across, and myopia. I wondered if they needed a new pair of glasses, because they squinted through theirs when I walked into the office that had once been mine.

“Hi,” I said, the weight of the world hanging on the word.

Leo snorted. “I used to imagine this moment, y’know,” they informed me. “I thought about what you’d say to me if you ever came back for us—Mal and Zee are going to be so mad they missed this—but all you have to say to me is ‘Hi’? I’m disappointed in you, Mom.”

“Well,” I huffed, “apologizing isn’t going to fix this, and technically I’d be apologizing for my future self because I haven’t died yet. I haven’t been pregnant yet, either. I don’t even want kids right now. I have no idea how to talk to a kid I haven’t even tried to have yet.”

“I was three when you died,” Leo retorted. “I’m not a kid anymore. I never got a chance to have a childhood. I never got a chance to _know_ you,” they gnawed on the inside of one of their cheeks, “my only memory of you is when you promised to come back home and then you never did.”

Leo was so angry at me, at the person I was going to be in five years, and I couldn’t even blame them. I swallowed thickly. “This is a potential future,” I said, “it feels real, solid, but it won’t let it calcify. I am the butterfly effect, I am the hurricane, and I _will_ change everything. I promise you, Leo, and—”

“Snarts always keep their promises,” Leo said. Quietly, like they were caught between the reality of me and whatever ghost they’d built out of my memory.

“Or we die trying,” I quipped.

Leo burst out laughing with a sharp gust of sound and buried their face in both hands. I knew the moment their laughter shapeshifted into tears. I didn’t want to touch them, in case they’d inherited my aversion to physical contact, so I sat there awkwardly watching my hypothetical kid cry and felt helpless because I couldn’t fix anything for them.

Ray came running to find me after the transponder picked up a signal from the Waverider. Rip landed the ship on the roof of S. T. A. R. Labs and emerged from the hatch with his brown coat billowing dramatically behind him.

“Sorry we’re late,” he quipped.

That’s when my sister hauled off and slugged him in the jaw. Lisa put her weight behind it, and Rip went down like a sack of potatoes: flopping awkwardly and flailing a little bit.

“I deserved that,” Rip said, and winced when the words popped his jaw on their way out of his mouth.

I stepped around him, limping onto the ship, every step a fresh ache because I’d been off my meds for months. “Gideon,” I said, “I need an infusion of—”

“ORENCIA,” Gideon interjected, “a soluble fusion protein that consists of the extracellular domain of human cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated antigen CTLA-4 linked to the modified Fc portion of human immunoglobulin IgG1. I found traces of the drug in your system when I took samples at the beginning of our voyage. If you like, I can undo the arthrodesis surgery on your wrist, separate the bones of the condyloid joint, and fortify them against the inflammatory sediment in your bloodstream.”

I blinked in confusion. I’d asked Gideon if there was a cure for RA in the future, and xe had said there wasn’t one.

“It’s not a cure,” xe told me, “you will still have to suppress your immune system every four weeks to keep the disease from progressing, but this process should mitigate your chronic pain.”

I’d been living with chronic pain and chronic illness for years, and while I knew “disabled” wasn’t synonymous with “broken,” I wasn’t going to refuse futuristic microsurgery if having it meant I could live without pain. Don’t judge me.

“Okay,” I used the wall to support my weight as I limped to the med bay since my cane wasn’t cutting it anymore, “beam me up or whatever. Oh!” I’d almost forgotten with the pain and everything, “please tell Len I’m in here.”

“I would,” Gideon said as I flopped into the chair and blue light refracted over me, “but Mr. Snart is not on the ship. Chronos absconded with the jump ship and took your husband with him.”

That’s when xe started the process, and I screamed because extracting the metal implants from inside my wrist hurt like hell. Lisa, Kendra, Ray, Jax, Martin, and Rip came running at the sound and found me crying over my arm.

“What’s wrong?” Ray asked.

I shook my head slowly and smiled at him. “ _Look_ ,” I said.

Then, I bent my wrist back and forth to make right angles with my bad hand. Only it wasn’t my bad hand anymore, it was just my right hand again.

Such a thing might’ve seemed very small to someone who’d never had their functionality siphoned away until they couldn’t do things most people take for granted, but it was _huge_ for me.

I could pick stuff up. I could use my wheelchair without anyone pushing me around. I could finger Len or give him a handjob without hurting myself. I could hold a hardcover book. I could peel and chop vegetables. I could do up my own buttons, zip my own zippers, lace my own corsets and shoes.

I could do anything.

I could do everything.

I wanted to cry, but there had been enough tears. I used my cane to get back on my feet because my ankle was still inflamed and looked at Lisa, who had changed into jeans and a leather jacket the first chance she got. “Len isn’t here,” I told her, “Chronos took him.”

Lisa rolled her eyes at Rip, then flipped her curls over her shoulder. “So let’s go get Lenny back,” she gave me a sweet, slow smile. “I miss my jerk brother.”

Kendra had also changed into jeans the moment the opportunity presented itself. “Why did Chronos take Snart?” she wondered. “Couldn’t he have taken all of you in?”

“You sound dubious,” Rip deduced.

Kendra nodded. “If Chronos was going to settle for taking one person you’d think it would be you,” she folded her arms and caught my eyes, “he took Snart for a reason.”

I’d assumed that Chronos was David Clinton or Walker Gabriel, both of whom had used the name Chronos in the comics, but he could’ve been anybody from any point in time. Len had been a criminal since he was a kid—he had no shortage of enemies—but I doubted any of them had a vendetta so visceral they’d become a temporal mercenary. There was only one person who could’ve hated him enough for that. Someone we’d left behind. Someone the Time Masters could’ve turned against us. Someone who’d loved him once.

I’d known that marooning him would create a divergent timeline in which we never returned for Mick. I’d thought that timeline wouldn’t cross over with ours. I’d thought wrong.

I side-eyed Rip from the seat across from the captain’s chair once we’d slipped into hypertime. If he’d tracked us from the past to a potential future, then he could ostensibly find my husband. “Okay,” I stretched the _oh_ sound out into an _ooh_ , “how’d you find us? It’s not like we stayed put until the sixties.”

“Gideon’s temporal navigation system was compromised after Chronos attacked us,” Martin told me, “but when we emerged from the time stream we found traces of a temporal anomaly in Seattle circa 1960. Jefferson helped Rip make the necessary repairs before we attempted to locate you.”

“Gideon couldn’t locate your biosignatures in the past,” Rip interjected, “but we managed to track your location through time despite the fluctuations in the timeline.”

“Sara was still in the past,” I pointed out.

Kendra unstrapped herself from her seat and stood to glare at Rip, her wings unfolding and flapping, her anger externalized. “You just _left_ her there?” she shouted.

“Gideon couldn’t locate Ms. Lance,” Rip explained huffily. “I had no choice but to find you first. I assumed you would know where to find her.”

“Nanda Parbat,” I told him. “Sara retroactively went to rejoin the League of Assassins.”

“Sara wanted us all to move on with our lives,” Lisa pointed out, “and she was trying to move forward.”

“Sara didn’t move forwards with her life,” Kendra murmured, “she moved backwards.”

Ray, meanwhile, was looking at me so hard I had to challenge the floor to a staring contest. “Yeah,” he said in a voice that was equal parts wishful thinking and bittersweet acceptance that his wishes weren’t coming true, “she said she wanted to go to a place where she belonged.”

“There is one source we can check to test your theory.” Rip went to stand at the head of the table. “Gideon, bring up the Shadow Record.”

“Shadow Record?” Jax asked with a cautious edge to his tone.

“Yes,” said Gideon, “the list of every member of the League of Assassins since the invention of writing in 3200 BCE.”

I had to bite the inside of my cheek to stop myself from explaining that systems of proto-writing using ideographs and mnemonic symbols dated as far back as Neolithic China. Nobody was bitter about historians pretending those symbols didn’t have linguistic content except me. Technically what Gideon was talking about was how the Mesopotamians circa 3200 BCE invented the ancient Sumerian language as a writing system, not writing itself, but I digress.

“Fascinating,” said Martin, “except these sheets of papyrus are entirely blank.”

“No. No. No,” Rip exhaled an exasperated noise, “the League used invisible ink. I did my graduate thesis at the academy on their history.”

“Okay,” I blurted, “there’s no way you’re old enough to have finished grad school and been captain of this spaceship for over a decade. I call shenanigans.”

“I’m older than I look,” Rip deadpanned.

“Time Masters are genetically modified with AAV genomes that cause an immunoresponse which makes their telomerase hyperactive without the risk of telomere deterioration or carcinogenesis,” Gideon explained, “you have all been genetically modified in the same way so you won’t age while aboard the Waverider.”

I figured I should be mad about that, but at least it meant I hadn’t lost almost a year of my life to the fifties. Len and I weren’t losing time with each other we should’ve had in the present, either. That was good enough for me.

“Sara told me that Ra’s al Ghul had lived for nearly a century before she met him,” Kendra said as she watched Gideon scroll through the Shadow Record on the tabletop screen.

Ray cocked his head at the screen, not really looking at the obvoluted words. “Thanks to the Lazarus pit,” he said.

Martin narrowed his eyes and gaped a little bit in a nonverbal _explain yourself, Raymond_.

“It’s basically a life-extending Jacuzzi located in a place that’s the opposite of life-extending,” Ray quipped.

I snorted. “Accurate.”

“Oh,” Rip said in a voice tinged green with envy, “you should count yourself lucky, Dr. Palmer. Only a handful of outsiders have been inside the League’s fortress and lived to tell the tale.”

“Mrs. Snart and Ms. Saunders are correct,” said Gideon, “there is a mention of an al-Ta’ir al-Usfar.”49

Rip booped the screen over and over in the throes of his fanboying. I figured he would’ve squee’d, except he was far too British. “That’s Sara’s League of Assassins name,” he said excitedly. “According to the Shadow Record she joined the League in 1958.”

“Incredible,” said Martin, “Sara became a member of the secret organization that trained her to be an assassin fifty years prior to when she initially joined.”

“Sara needs our help,” Rip shook the squee off before he shifted his focus to the seriousness of the situation, “by all accounts Ra’s al Ghul is a very controlling, very homicidal fanatic.”

Gideon charted a course for Nanda Parbat and we arrived on September eighth, 1960. At this point, Sara had been the Canary again for two and a half years.

Of course the fortress wasn’t accessible. It was a city hidden in a crevice of the Himalayas, lurking along the banks of the Sindhu River below Nanga Parbat. We were going inside the Naked Mountain, but I didn’t have the heart to make a dirty joke without Len around to hear it.

Martin eyed the shadows around us like he expected something to jump out of them at any moment. “Well,” he whispered, “perhaps Jefferson and I should—”

“I think not,” Rip somehow managed to yawp in a whisper and pointed at the professor with a stern finger, “extricating Sara from the likes of the League requires _stealth_ , so no Firestorm for the two of you,” he turned to look at Ray, “and you’re out of practice, so no exosuit unless absolutely necessary.”

That’s when a dude in black jumped out of the shadows at Ray and Jax punched him in the face. I blinked as the dude went down, scimitar in hand. Lisa aimed her gun at him to finish the job. I side-eyed her until she huffed and lowered her superweapon.

“Thanks,” Ray told Jax.

“Well done, Jefferson,” Martin added with pride radiating in his voice.

Rip, meanwhile, was trying to unlock the secret door. “You guard the exit while I find Sara,” he ordered as the chains slid clinking onto the ground. “We will be in and out of here faster than you can say Ra’s al Ghul.”

Then he _shhh_ ’d us. I made a garbage disposal noise as his silhouette was swallowed by the shadows in the doorway.

“Okay,” I whispered once he was gone, “two things. First, leaving everyone at the mouth of the Naked Mountain is a terribad plan. Second, I have to pee.”

“I’ll come with,” Lisa said without bothering to whisper, “to make sure you don’t get knocked out and tortured again.”

“Ugh!” I squawked indignantly, “that was one time!”

Shockingly, the League of Assassins had indoor plumbing inside the Naked Mountain. I’d expected a chamber pot or something of that ilk, but then I felt the pipes slithering through the walls. I figured they got water from the river. Hell, there was toilet paper and everything. It could’ve been so much worse.

Or so I thought, until I tried to communicate with the rest of the team and learned they’d been captured by Sara and a slew of other assassins. “Oh,” I made another garbage disposal noise. “Oh no.”

“What’s wrong?” Lisa asked.

“Sara is experiencing something called time drift,” I told her, “she’s not only regressed into being al-Ta’ir al-Usfar again, she’s lost herself too. Actually, I think she’s trying to emulate Nyssa.”

That’s when a team of five assassins surrounded us. I snorted and zapped them all at once so they dropped like flies, the electricity buzzing in aftermath before I absorbed the excess of energy. Opening the wormhole had been the first time I’d used my powers in months. I hadn’t let myself use them after they’d escalated, but more on that later.

Lisa pouted. “You could’ve at least let me have one,” she told me petulantly. “You never let me have any _fun_.”

“You had enough fun working for the mob in 1958,” I retorted, “chill.”

“Snarts have no chill,” Lisa snarked back.

I giggled. I couldn’t help it! “You’re not wrong,” I capitulated.

That’s when I overheard Rip demand a trial by combat. At the same time, the jump ship landed by the river. I booped its interface and found that it was inside of another time ship. There was no one on board when I talked to the artificial intelligence construct that came with that ship.

“Mick is Chronos,” I told my sister, “and he didn’t kill Len because he wants to make him watch us die over and over as revenge for marooning him.”

“Welp,” Lisa deadpanned as she shot a poor unfortunate assassin in the face.

I zapped another, left him twitching on the floor. Ra’s chose Sara as his champion. Kendra volunteered as tribute. I wondered why Rip thought Ray had no experience with a sword, because he’d been fencing since he was a kid. Hell, he’d been an Olympic hopeful when he was a teenager, but I digress.

Mick was inside the mountain now. I felt his armor, felt the ferrous metal in the futuristic alloy, and opened my eyes to _see_. There were more than a hundred members of the League between me and my friends, excluding the ones in the room where the Lazarus pit lurked. I generated simultaneous electromagnetic pulses to scramble their brains like eggs in a skillet.

“This is your brain on lightning,” I quipped.

Lisa side-eyed me over her shoulder, a nonverbal _Seriously, bitch?_

I shrugged. Len would’ve laughed at that. I missed him raw and pulsing, like an exposed nerve ending. I let my eyes white out, let veins of lightning thread themselves through my hair, let sparks dance over my skin until I knew I was all lit up from the inside.  I felt a thunderstorm brewing in the crevice of the mountain and welcomed the cold, the heat, the wind, the rain.

I’d been pretending I was an ordinary human for far too long. I’d almost forgotten that I was a flash of lightning with flesh and blood, a beating heart.

Mick got to them before we did. I arrived in time to see a blast of blue plasma knock him onto his back. Jax and Kendra, who’d both taken flight, came back down to earth. I generated a vein of lightning that hauled him up until his feet dangled in midair, his body twitching as the electrocution fizzed through him.

Ra’s whispered something that sounded like _Perunika_ and bowed his head. Perunika was a name for Ognjena Marija, the Slavic goddess of thunder, lightning, and justice on earth. How cool was that?

“Mac!” Len shouted my name and I heard it through the thunder, loud and bright and _real_. “Don’t kill him.”

“Snart?” Jax blurted his name in a bluster as the flames in his hands fizzled out.

I heaved a dry, broken sob before I stopped inducting. Mick dropped to his knees, his chest heaving under his breastplate, his body twitching in places. I’d imagined that voice so many times in the past ten months. Nothing compared to the sound of his throat working, his tongue against his teeth. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t use my words. Not if that meant losing the cadence of his voice, the way his mouth felt wrapped around my name.

“Sorry,” Rip interjected. “Don’t kill Chronos?”

“He’s not Chronos,” Len said in the most desperate voice I’d ever heard come out of his mouth.

“He’s Mick,” I bit out his name. “He’s been Mick this whole time.”

Jax yanked off the helmet to see for himself. Mick snarled and tried to crawl for his weapon. Sara kicked him in the face and knocked him out cold.

I exhaled sharply and turned to see my husband. Len stood in the doorway, a pair of futuristic handcuffs dangling from his left wrist, his right wrist a frostbitten stump where his hand should’ve been. I figured he’d chosen to freeze his dominant hand to keep his wedding ring intact, and my heart clenched horribly inside my chest when I saw that.

Lisa covered her mouth with the hand she wasn’t using to hold her gold gun to muffle a gasp. I’d never seen her so vulnerable, so emotional where anyone could see, never seen her hand shake with a weapon drawn before.

Len smiled at her, his mouth unfurling softly. “Hey, Sis.”

What had taken months for us was only hours to him, but it had taken him seconds to choose us over himself.

“Hi,” I told him softly. “Do you need a hand?”

Len exhaled a harsh gust of laughter, like a fresh cut across an exposed throat. “Yeah,” he said in a voice caught somewhere between smooth and shaken. “C’mere.”

I let him tuck me under his arm before we left the mountain, but I didn’t want to kiss him or hold him until I could stay in his arms for as long as I possibly could. I’d gone without touching and being touched by him for ten months. I just wanted him to lie on top of me so I could inhale him while he held me and told me how much he loved me. I’d almost forgotten what he smelled like and I’d missed his voice the most. I’d missed his voice even more than I’d missed his lips, or his hands, or his cock. Don’t judge me.

Kendra reached out to take Sara’s hand in hers, the motion soft and unsure. I arched my eyebrows at them after Sara interlaced their fingers. “How’d you go from a fight to the death to holding hands?” I wondered. “What did I miss?”

Sara gave me a wide smile that didn’t show her teeth. “Kendra flew,” she told me, “and I kissed her in midair.”

“I kissed _you_ ,” Kendra retorted with an edge of rueful laughter, “after you tried to stab my wings.”

“Well,” Sara smiled wider and shyly all at once, “I guess it’s my turn.”

Then she actually dipped her back and kissed her on the shadowy road between the hidden city and the spaceship, with the moonlight refracting off the river in iridescent slivers. I tucked my cane into the crook of my elbow and started a slow clap. Firestorm had flown back to the ship because Martin didn’t want to walk anymore. Ray, who’d been carrying Mick using the tensile strength of his exosuit, caught up with us and we all walked back to the Waverider together. Rip brought up the rear because he kept glancing back wistfully over his shoulder at the headquarters of his favorite historical figure: Damian Wayne, son of the Batman and Talia al Ghul, grandson of the Head of the Demon.

Anyhow.

Once we’d imprisoned him in a cell aboard the ship, it didn’t take much time for Mick to wake up. “You think this is all over?” he snarled. “I will kill every single one of you! I will watch you all burn!”

I figured that meant the Mick I knew was still in there somewhere. That was good enough for me.

“You!” Mick shouted at Len. “You should’ve killed me when you had the chance—”

That’s when Rip silenced him by hitting the mute button that came with his cell. “You owe us an explanation,” he told Len.

“Yes,” Martin said, “it’s quite remarkable that Mr. Rory is working for the Time Masters considering you killed him.”

“If you think back,” Lisa said, “Lenny never actually told you that he killed Mick.”

“No,” Jax retorted, “he just let us think that he did.”

“I didn’t have to try too hard, did I?” Len snarked back. Then his gaze flicked to Mick in the cell and he sighed. “Well, maybe I should’ve killed him. Then at least he wouldn’t have ended up a chew toy for the Time Masters.”

“But if you did,” said Rip, “then we wouldn’t have this opportunity.”

Ray arched his eyebrows at Rip. “To do what?” he asked.

“To reform Mr. Rory,” Rip informed him.

Kendra shook her head so blonde streaks in her hair oscillated around her face. “He _killed_ Aldus,” she bit out.

“Under the influence of the Time Masters,” Rip quibbled.

“Chronos killed Aldus,” said Martin, “Mr. Rory was fighting on our side that day.”

I scoffed at the semantics, but I didn’t want Mick dead. Bea would be _pissed_ , and that would mean I’d have to reupholster my couch because of the scorch marks. Lisa would be pleased, but I’d miss the giant cheerful roses.

“I know what it’s like to be trained by an organization for one purpose: to kill,” Sara murmured, “and the kind of loyalty that it can inspire. I need to know that we can reach him, for my own sake.”

“Yes,” said Martin, “the Time Masters took one of our own and turned him against us. I say we undo their handiwork.”

“Mick saved my life,” Ray pointed out, “back in Russia. He’s more than just a criminal and an arsonist.”

“He’s a member of our team,” Jax said.

“He’s a lost cause,” Len snarked back.

I shrugged his arm off my shoulders, told the cell to open, and walked in without my cane.

“Mrs. Snart!” Rip yawped. “What do you think you’re doing?”

I told the sliding doors to close behind me, shutting his voice out. Rip unmuted the cell and kept yelling. I ignored him. Mick stood, towering over me with his height and bulk as his hands clenched into fists.

“You want to kill us all?” I limped into his discomfort zone so I could feel his chest rise and fall in the space between us. “You want to hurt Len? Here’s your chance. Kill me.” I tilted my head up and exposed my throat, prey to a predator. “Show me there’s nothing worth saving about you.”

Mick reached for me. Len threw himself at whatever futuristic polymer the cell was made of, shouting, _begging_ for him not to hurt me. Then he shut up when Mick grit his teeth around a frustrated growl and fell to his knees, howling, anger bleeding out from every line of his body. I reached out to touch his face, thumbing the scar my husband had left on his cheek lifetimes ago. Mick clung to my forearm and held onto me with both hands, finding a fulcrum.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I hate you,” Mick snarled, “all of you.”

I swallowed thickly. “I know,” I told him softly. I hated myself a little bit, too.

* * *

Rip took Len to the med bay after that and put his forearm on weird science machine with a strange glowing apparatus that shone bright, eerie blue. I plopped myself onto a stool and held his hand in both of mine. I’d escalated from wanting him to lie on top of me to wanting him inside me, but I dialed back the thirst because this wasn’t about me.

“Gideon,” said Rip, “start the regeneration process.”

“What do you mean, regeneration?” Len wanted to know.

“I took genetic samples from each of you at the start of our voyage for this exact eventuality,” Rip explained.

I squeezed his fingers. Len exhaled sharply and squeezed back. “Why’re we only hearing about this now?” he asked in the deadly calm voice that meant he might lose his cool.

Rip shrugged. “Because none of you had lost a limb yet,” he said matter-of-factly.

Len cocked his head in concession and winced as his bones regrew. “Ow,” he clenched his jaw and squeezed my hand again. I watched the skin regrow over the nerves and tendons, watched him move his fingers. “So,” he turned and gave me that filthy smirk. “How about we take my new hand for a test drive?”

I smiled and showed him my slightly crooked teeth. “I guess I can give you a hand with that,” I deadpanned.

Len chuckled and heat coiled through me, sweet and vivid and sharp. I hadn’t felt like that in months. I didn’t have a sex drive when I couldn’t have the person that I loved. I’d only masturbated because the pleasure mitigated the pain, and because I liked orgasms. I didn’t _want_ , not the way I wanted him. Hell, I’d never wanted anybody like I wanted him.

“How long?” Len asked me once we were alone in the room equidistant from the hatch and command central.

I muffled a yawn in one palm before I answered his question with a question. “What?”

Len touched my hair and threw off tiny sparks. “Your hair’s longer,” he pointed out. “You’ve also lost weight. Maybe ten pounds. How long were you in 1958?”

“Um,” my voice pitched awkwardly higher, “long enough that it was 1959 when I opened a wormhole to a potential future where everybody dies in 2021 after we fail to end Savage. I spent ten months without you. Also,” I elongated the _oh_ sound and broke eye contact, “I slept with Ray.”

“What?” Len snarled and somehow hissed the _t_ sound despite the lack of sibilant consonants in the word he’d said.

“I didn’t have sex with him!” I clarified. “I shared a bed with him—platonically!—but he took it the wrong way and now he thinks he loves me. I can’t even be mad at him, because I would’ve done the exact same thing if I didn’t have you.”

“I can,” Len growled. “Raymond can’t have you,” he fisted his hand in my hair and pinned me between him and the mechanized door. “You’re _mine_.”

“You’re such a jealous loser,” I huffed. “You know I don’t want anyone else.”

Len pulled my hair to make me gasp and kissed my neck, a sharp hint of teeth scraping over where my pulse fluttered under my skin. “You love me,” he whispered lowly into my ear.

I cradled the back of his head and stroked his short hair. “Yes,” I whispered back. “I love you so much.”

“I love you more,” Len said with slow vehemence before he kissed me hard.

I moaned into his mouth and kissed him back. Len didn’t stop kissing me when he shucked his jacket. Instead he cupped my face after the leather was on the floor, his thumbs caressing my cheekbones, his palms cold against my flushed cheeks. I scooped my hands underneath his shirt to feel him, my greedy palms smoothing over the familiar musculature of his back and shoulders. Len broke the kiss to pull his shirt over his head and smirked when he saw that I was blushing.

“That was our first kiss in ten months for you, hmm?” he said in that low, intimate voice.

I nodded and tugged my bottom lip between my teeth. “I missed you so much,” I said in a hushed voice because I was ashamed of what I was about to tell him. “I told myself you weren’t dead, but I didn’t always believe that. I thought I’d lost you. I thought we might never see each other again—”

Len tilted my chin up and gave me another kiss, one so hot my toes curled and my whole body tingled. Then he unzipped my dress, yanking the straps over my shoulders, kissing me bruising and urgent. I squirmed until my dress slipped off onto the floor and kicked it away. Len unbuttoned his pants and dropped them so they could keep my dress company.

“Mick threatened Lisa,” he growled after he broke the kiss, “he threatened you. I froze off my own hand because I was terrified he wasn’t just making empty threats,” he bit down around the consonant and moaned when I cupped his face and strung a line of soft kisses from the hollow under the hinge of his jawbone to the sharp jut of his collarbone. “I don’t want Mick dead, but if I have to choose between you and him, I’m going to choose you.”

That’s when Len scooped me up and took me to bed. I gasped when his teeth skimmed the tops of my breasts and he nuzzled my cleavage, not bothering to take off my bra. Instead he tugged the silk cups down and nibbled on the fleshy parts of my breasts while he teased my nipples with his thumbs and forefingers. I clung to the back of his head and whimpered at how rough he was being, how much teeth he was using.

I was throbbing all through my belly and thighs when he kissed my chin and cupped me through my panties. “Len,” I moaned.

Len stroked one finger into my slit through the silky fabric and chuckled low in his throat when my hips jerked without my permission. “Yes?” he whispered, stretching the sibilant out smugly.

“I want you to take me from behind and fuck me hard,” I whispered back. “I want to feel you inside me for days.”

“ _Yes_ ,” Len hissed fervently before he moved to sit back and watch me get on all fours.

I unhooked my bra, dropped it over the edge of the mattress, and took my panties off before I stuck out my ass for him. Len slipped one hand between my legs and made a raw noise when he felt how slick I was—it hadn’t taken much, but then it had been ten months since he’d touched me. I’d touched myself, but it wasn’t the same. Not that I couldn’t get myself off, but I couldn’t lose myself, couldn’t get myself out of my own head.

Len made me stop thinking when he smoothed his other hand up from my ass to grab my hip, holding me where he wanted me as he worked two fingers into my wet hole. I moaned again when he spread them slowly, working me open, and muffled a scream in one palm. Len crooked his fingers and made me come just like _that_ , jolting pleasure through me like a lightning strike.

I had an orgasm from getting struck by lightning once, before I was married to Len, during the months when I was learning to control my abilities. Until this moment that had been the best orgasm I’d ever had.

Len sucked my slick from his fingers and made a low, vulgar noise in the back of his throat. I was gasping when he thrust all the way inside me with one hard stroke and made me scream again. I squirmed as he fucked me into the mattress until my knees gave out. I oozed, my forearms and elbows slipping against the sheets, and exhaled a soft whoosh of air. Len wrapped an arm around my waist and rubbed my clit teasingly slow, upping his game. “You’re shaking your ass like a little _slut_ ,” he grabbed my hair and growled into my ear. “You missed my cock that much, hmm?”

“I actually missed you calling me a slut,” I huffed, “even though it’s sexist and I should hate it.”

“Yeah.” Len kissed my shoulder and fucked me harder instead of apologizing because he wasn’t sorry at all. “Say my name,” he ordered.

“Len,” I said in a soft, desperate voice as the buildup to another orgasm twisted below my belly.

I moaned when he flicked my swollen clit because it felt so good it almost hurt, a hot prickly sensation that shouldn’t’ve been pleasurable but somehow was. Len made a raw noise and blew his load inside me after I came again on his cock. I snuggled back against him, a little bit sore, but satisfied and safer than I’d felt in ten months. Len cuddled me closer and buried his face in the crook of my neck. I knew him well enough to know he’d missed me just as much as I’d missed him, even though he’d only spent a day without me.

“I’m sorry your day sucked,” I said.

“Yeah, me too.” Len heaved a sigh and nuzzled my neck. “I’m sorry you and the ladies got stuck in 1958.”

I figured he was lumping Ray in with the ladies on purpose. I rolled my eyes where he couldn’t see. “Okay,” I groaned internally, “calling Ray a lady isn’t insulting unless you think the female of the species is inferior. Do you?”

Len chuckled and whispered a quatrain of the poem I was referencing lowly into my ear. “‘Man’s timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say, for the Woman that God gave him isn’t his to give away; but when hunter meets with husbands, each confirms the other’s tale—the female of the species is more deadly than the male.’”50

“Hng…” I groaned externally, “you’re not playing fair.”

“I don’t play _fair_.” Len tilted my chin up and kissed me over my shoulder, lingering and biting my bottom lip hard enough to make me moan again before he broke the kiss. “I play to win.”

I rolled my eyes at him until he moved back and spread my thighs apart. “Um,” I blurted, “what do you think you’re doing?”

Len squeezed my hip, stroking my lion tattoo with his thumb, smirking at the mess he’d made between my legs. “This,” he whispered and kissed my chin, my throat.

I cradled the back of his head and caught his earlobe in between my teeth, nibbling and sucking to make him moan. Len pinned my other hand above my head and intertwined our fingers. I smiled as he settled on top of me, his body weight intimately familiar, and kissed the scars I’d left on his shoulder. All five of them—every warped fingerprint, every permanent mark.

“Love you,” I told him softly.

“Love you too.” Len narrowed his eyes and frowned. “Were you on the pill in 1958?”

I shook my head slowly. “No, I…” Then it hit me, why he was asking: he’d come inside me and I wasn’t on birth control. I couldn’t believe I’d let it happen _again_. I sighed and my head flopped back against the sheets. “Gideon,” I said, “is there a futuristic morning after pill I can take?”

“Yes,” xe said, “but using emergency contraception is unnecessary, because whenever Mr. Snart ejaculates inside of you, you kill his semen with fulgurkinesis before he can impregnate you.”

“What,” I stretched the short vowel sound out awkwardly.

“So does that mean she can’t get pregnant?” Len wanted to know.

“No,” xe informed him, “it means Mrs. Snart won’t get pregnant unless she wants to.”

I burst out laughing, ecstatic, pun unintended. Knowing I had that control over my body was fucking glorious. I wasn’t going to stop taking birth control—I’d been on the pill for hormonal migraines for years before I started having sex—but I’d never have another pregnancy scare. I wouldn’t have any of our hypothetical children until I wanted them. How cool was that?

Len fisted the hand I wasn’t holding in my hair. “Look at me,” he ordered in that low, intimate voice.

I squirmed at the stickiness between our bodies and met his varicolored eyes. I didn’t tell him about Leo, or how terribad our future could be. I squeezed his fingers and hooked my legs around his waist instead. Len exhaled a soft, desperate noise when I started moving my hips under him. I smoothed my other hand along the arch of his spine and inducted a low voltage of electricity through his body. Len clenched his teeth and hissed at the sensation, grinding his hips against mine as his cock got hard again.

“Mac,” he bit down around the consonant in my name, “I need to be inside of you.”

I whimpered and tugged my bottom lip between my teeth as the hard length of him rubbed between my glossy folds. I was still a little bit sore, but I wanted more of him. “Yes,” I said, “please.”

Len took it slow, burying his thick cock as deep inside me as he could and moving his hips so the head of him swirled roughly against my cervix. I trembled under him, my toes curling tight, my heels digging into the small of his back as pleasure and heat throbbed below my belly.

It wasn’t fucking. It was working out all the guilt he felt for marooning his partner, for failing Mick and leaving him for the Time Masters, for breaking his promise to himself. It was shedding the skin of the lesser version of myself I’d become in 1958. It was a homecoming miles from our house, lightyears from our city, and decades before we’d meet.

I told him that I loved him until I couldn’t use my words anymore, until the monosyllable of his name became the only sound I could make, until he stopped my mouth with his kiss.

Len kissed me like we had all the time in the world, in any world.

(Oh, the irony.)

* * *

Sara and Kendra had their arms around each other when they walked back into command central with sex hair and no shame. Lisa had fallen asleep in her seat, her arms folded and her head pillowed on her shoulder, her nostrils flaring as she snored quietly. I was shocked—pun unintended—that she would put herself in such a vulnerable position, but then she’d spent ten months with me and half the team. Maybe she trusted them at least a little bit by now.

“I believe we’re ready to leave 1960,” Rip said.

“And go where?” Sara asked, then caught herself on the syntax of that question. “I mean, when?”

“2147,” Rip told her solemnly, “mere decades before Vandal Savage conquered the world.”

“Thought you had no idea where he was,” Len snarked back.

I made a garbage disposal noise. “Or when,” I pointed out.

“You said Savage had been lost to history.” Martin threw the word _lost_ at Rip in accusation.

“Yes,” said Rip, “world-changing history. Our records of the period are scarce, but I’ve always known that Vandal Savage can be located in 2147.”

“So why didn’t you tell us this sooner?” Jax wanted to know.

“Because that period of history is fraught with more peril than I was willing to risk,” Rip heaved a sigh, “now we have no choice but to stop Vandal Savage in 2147, or to die trying.”

“Well,” Kendra smiled after Sara nuzzled her shoulder, “I’ve died before.”

Sara nodded. “So have I.”

“Hell,” I exhaled a soft flare of rueful laughter, “technically I’m not even supposed to exist anymore, but I’ve died twice and I’m still here. I think that means time is on my side.”

Len grinned and took his seat beside his sister. Lisa opened her eyes and gave me a slow, deadly smile. “Our side is the winning side,” she said. “Snarts play to win.”

I smiled back as the rest of the team strapped themselves in. I felt recharged—pun unintended—after the great sex, being mistaken for a goddess, and using fulgurkinesis again. I hadn’t just returned to Len. I’d also come back to myself.

“Gideon,” said Rip, “chart a course for Kasnia Conglomerate in the year 2147.”

* * *

**Scene V**  
The Hero as World Redeemer 

* * *

Kaznia was a country in the Balkans from _Superman: The Animated Series_ , and coordinates from the cartoon meant that it corresponded with the Аутономна Покрајина Војводина in the northern quarter of Serbia on Earth-33.51 That didn’t change, even though it had become the Republic of Kasnia on Earth-1. Apparently the Kasnia Conglomerate was a future version of Војводина, because a corporation had taken over the province the same way S. T. A. R. Labs had taken over the Gem Cities, but I digress.52

I’d fallen asleep during the time jump into the future and when I woke up we’d landed on July thirty-first, 2147. Exactly ten years before the original version of Rose Russell was born. Anachronistic, but still. It was my birthday. It was the one constant in the temporal mishmash that was my backstory. It had been and would always be mine.

“Happy birthday,” Ray told me once the date occupied one corner of the tabletop screen.

Lisa snorted. “Again,” she pointed out, “since we celebrated your birthday over the summer in 1958.”

“That reminds me,” Len put an arm around my waist and leaned in to whisper conspiratorially in my ear, “didn’t I promise to do a striptease for your birthday?”

“Um,” I blurted awkwardly because he had indeed promised me that and thinking about him undressing made me blush, “you were drunk and I was hoping you’d forget about it.”

Len stole a quick, possessive kiss. “Nah,” he smirked at how flushed my cheeks were after I nuzzled his nose with mine. “I always keep my promises.”

I smiled when I noticed he’d worn the overcoat with the elbow patches for me and tucked my hand in the crook of his elbow when we left the Waverider. I had to turn my engagement ring around because people didn’t wear colorful diamonds in the Kasnia Conglomerate. Nobody wore colorful anything, actually. It was shades of gray as far as I could see: an oppressively monochromatic cityscape of gray buildings, gray pavement, and gray garments. Lisa had been aghast when Rip told her that she couldn’t wear jeans or her leather jacket. Instead she opted for a little black dress, black thigh-highs, charcoal gray stiletto heels, and a gray jacket. Len refused to deviate from his black on black aesthetic. I wore all black too, so for once we matched.

Kendra wasn’t allowed to leave the ship unless it was absolutely necessary because of the peril Rip told us about, but everyone else got to take a look at the futuristic province. Sara and Jax were making fun of how fascinated and astonished the professor was with the whole time travel thing. Ray stopped giving me looks and started eyeballing the futuristic architecture. That was progress.

“2147 was considered the world’s zenith,” Rip explained as we walked along part of the DTD canal, “all of these people have five good years to look forward to.”

Len frowned as a little girl walked past us holding her parents’ hands. “Before what?” he asked.

“Before a ruthless dictator named Per Degaton comes to power, releases the Armageddon virus, and most of them end up dead.” Rip answered flatly, like he was giving a history lecture even though none of this had happened yet.

Per Degaton53 was a glaringly obvious Nazi allegory in the comics. Obsessed with the idea of time travel to the point of insanity, and a founding member of the Time Stealers—an organization created to oppose the Time Masters in the comics.54 Totally different than the Time Masters that existed in the Arrowverse, but that was neither here nor there.

Sara heaved a sigh and slouched as she kept walking. “Well, that’s depressing.”

That’s when I felt the approach of a familiar interface and looked skyward at the militarized ATOM robots flying around. These autonomous machines weren’t identical to the exosuit Ray wore, but I felt the unique amalgamation of ferrous metals in the dwarf star alloy and I knew without a doubt that it was a bastardization of his patented technology.

Jax halted when he caught sight of them. “Whoa,” he said, awestruck.

“Is that my suit?” Ray frowned with his whole face—the space between his eyebrows scrunching up, his eyes narrowing at the familiar design, the corners of his mouth spiraling down—and said: “that’s my suit.”

Their plasma cannons shot red energy instead of blue, as evidenced when one of the robots blasted a purse snatcher. All three of them landed without rupturing the pavement and put the purse snatcher under arrest. Palmer Technologies had succeeded where Omni Consumer Products had failed and created robots that’d replaced human police officers. RoboCop, eat your heart out.

“That,” Rip pointed to the _RoboCop 2_ knockoffs, “is how Per Degaton’s father Tor maintains order in Kasnia.”

“Doesn’t look like progress to me,” Len deadpanned.

“Speaking of progress,” sad Rip, “we need to get a better lay of the land—”

“—and I need to get a better look at how they made my suit autonomous,” Ray interjected.

“Why don’t you take Martin and Jax with you?” Rip suggested. “Ms. Lance, the Snarts, and I will work on locating Savage.”

“I know where Savage is,” I told him, “this whole city exists on a network that all of its citizens are connected to.” I’d accessed that network the moment we left the ship because I wasn’t in the mood to lollygag in a country under the monotonous gray spell from _Halloweentown II: Kalabar’s Revenge_. “I found him at the Kasnia Corporate Headquarters,” I clarified. “There’s a board of directors who apparently run this country like congress in 2016. They’re having a shareholders’ meeting right now.”

That’s how we ended up breaking into the corporate HQ…by walking in through the front door. Len and Lisa actually pouted because they didn’t get to pull a B&E, despite how badly that would’ve ended with the robot gestapo. It was adorable, but I’d never say that out loud.

Anyhow.

“Tor Degaton has daily meetings with his board of directors,” Rip explained as we walked down the hall toward the boardroom.

“And it’s open to the public?” Sara asked even though she knew it would be too easy if they had been.

“Of course not,” Rip scoffed under his breath, “just Kasnia’s shareholders.”

“I hate to break this to you…” Lisa smiled when she noticed the staccato beat of her heels against the floor made him wince, “…we’re not shareholders.”

Len covered the back of the hand I’d tucked in the crook of his elbow with his palm and squeezed my fingers. “I’m more of a hard asset man, myself.”

I had to bite my cheek to keep myself from giggling. “I’m a fan of your assets,” I deadpanned.

“Good,” Len smirked crookedly with one corner of his lips quirked more than the other, “the feeling’s mutual.”

Rip extracted a plastic case from the pocket of his jacket and popped it open to reveal a pair of contact lenses. I rolled my eyes and looped the security footage in the hallway so nobody would notice he’d put on the illicit contacts in plain sight. All of the guards in the building wore red armbands, like the Nazis had worn. Creepy.

I didn’t bother to use my powers to get us all into the meeting. I figured we’d attract less attention if Rip went in alone, especially when he tried to pass me off as his personal assistant. Luckily I’d used some kind of futuristic hairspray Gideon had fabricated to turn my hair black for this mission, otherwise it would’ve been obvious to anyone who looked that I was a metahuman. Apparently metahumans were illegal in Kasnia. Anyone with a metagene had to have a power damper surgically implanted in the base of their spines, even if their metagene was dormant. Ugh.

I eavesdropped on the meeting and snorted when I heard Savage speak up.

“What’s going on?” Sara asked.

I sighed in a futile attempt to unclench, the afterglow completely snuffed out. “Savage is arguing that genocide is logical,” I told her.

“I’m shocked,” Len deadpanned.

Lisa folded her arms. “What exactly is the Armageddon virus?” she asked.

“It was a real thing scientists on Earth-33 were afraid of,” I said. “Crimean-Congo Viral Hemorrhagic Fever, a superflu they postulated would induce a cytokine storm, a hyperactive immunoresponse that would kill the infected in its attempts to fight the virus,” I spun the handle of my cane between the fingers of the hand Len wasn’t holding, “like how my immune system thinks attacking my joints is a good idea even though doing that crippled me. It was fatal in forty percent of the documented cases the scientific community knew of.” I accessed the network again to learn how drastically the population had increased in a century and a half. “There are twelve billion people on the planet now,” I said, “so even if this virus hasn’t evolved, which I doubt—”

“—an outbreak fatal to forty percent of the current global population would kill almost five billion people,” Lisa cocked her head as she did the math, “approximately four billion, eight hundred thousand, actually.”

“And that’s if the virus hasn’t gotten worse in a hundred and fifty-one years,” Sara pointed out, “but the flu gets new viral strains every year.”

“There’s no way this superflu kills less than half the global population,” Len said in his calmest, deadliest voice. “Savage wouldn’t settle for that.”

I nodded. “It’s had a century and a half to get smarter and they’ve had a century and a half to play god with bioweapons of mass destruction,” I said, “so between how smart this virus was in the reality where I grew up—which has inferior technology to this world—and a hundred and fifty-one years of advancement in offensive biological warfare…”

“Armageddon is a very apt name for this virus,” Lisa said.

I nodded again. “Yeah,” I quit stimming with my cane and heaved another sigh, “the future is screwed.”

* * *

Rip skulked in the hallways like a teenager in high school to stalk Savage, and we ditched him for the Waverider. I hadn’t bathed since 1959. Lisa wanted to take a long hot shower too, since she hadn’t bathed since 1959 either, but I called dibs and she had to wait her turn. I took a shower, reapplied the blackening spray to my dry hair and eyebrows before I emerged from the only bathroom on the ship, and shuffled into the captain’s quarters. Len had draped himself over the armrest of a chair, saving a seat for me. I had ninety-nine problems and my husband draping himself over various surfaces was about half of them, but I digress.55

Sara arched her eyebrows at Rip when he explained why Savage was living at the corporate headquarters. “He’s a teacher,” she said incredulously.

“Tutor, it would seem,” Rip clarified, “to young Per Degaton himself.”

“You say that like it’s supposed to mean something,” Len snarked back. I put my head on his knee and he stroked my hair, throwing off static electricity that I misconducted before it clung to anyone.

“After the death of his father in five years’ time,” Rip explained, “Per Degaton unleashes the Armageddon virus, which decimates the world’s population, leaving it ripe for conquest. Per Degaton primes the world for dictatorship, and then, when the time is right Savage snatches that power from him.”

“By killing Per Degaton,” Sara deduced.

It wasn’t a stretch. After all, Savage wasn’t competent enough as a tyrant to take power without first insinuating himself into the lives of men like Hitler or Stalin or the Degatons. All of whom had accomplished more in their mortal lifespans than Savage had in millennia. It would’ve been pathetic if the immortal psychopath hadn’t been trying to bring on Armageddon. Unfortunately, that was his diabolical plan.

“Indeed,” said Rip.

“Okay,” Kendra exhaled sharply, “we have the dagger that can kill Savage, and maybe now we can figure out a way to stop his rise to power.”

Rip nodded his agreement. “By depriving him of his springboard, Per Degaton.”

“Okay,” Sara moved to splay her fingers over the small of Kendra’s back, “how do we do that?”

I exhaled a soft whoosh of air. Len kept playing with my hair and said, “we kill the little bastard ourselves.”

After the others returned from their reconnaissance mission and Lisa had also emerged from the shower, we moved the debate on whether or not to kill Per Degaton into command central. Len folded himself into one of the chairs and took my hand to keep me from taking my seat across from the captain’s chair. I flopped onto his lap and Lisa sat in the seat to our left, to our left.

“To be clear,” Martin snapped from where he stood at the tail end of the table, “we’re talking about murdering a child!”

“Who hasn’t done anything to anyone,” Jax pointed out.

“ _Yet_ ,” said Len, “so why don’t we pick him off now, while the picking’s easy?”

“There’s got to be a better way,” Kendra protested.

Ray glanced at me. “How do we even know this Per Degaton kid’s path to becoming a world-ruling dictator is inevitable?” he wondered.

“Because,” said Rip, “in the future that I’m from, children learn about Per Degaton in the same way that children in your time learn about Adolf Hitler.”

“What about addressing the larger societal problems that would allow such a despot’s rise to power?” Martin suggested.

Lisa snorted at the idea of uprooting the entire country in a few hours. There was no time for that. “Sure, but we already know what pushes this kid to the dark side, professor.”

“Look,” Jax side-eyed my husband and stuffed his hands in his pockets, “it’s not the kid’s fault he’s got an immortal psychopath as his tutor.”

“If we don’t kill the kid now, Savage will,” Len pointed out harshly, “as soon as he’s done using him to take over the world.”

“If he doesn’t build him as the greatest tyrant the world has ever known,” said Rip, “Savage can’t become the last tyrant the world will ever know.”

Martin shook his head and said, “murdering a child in cold blood. Just like Savage murdered your own son. What’s the use in saving the world if we stoop to his methods to do so?”

Ray swallowed thickly. “I’m with Professor Stein,” he said.

“Okay, _fine_.” Len bit out and his jaw clenched around the words. “If y’all don’t have the guts to kill this kid…”

“Then removing him from the timeline might be the next best thing,” Rip suggested.

“Great,” Ray sighed heavily in a futile attempt to shake the tension from his shoulders, “we’ve gone from infanticide to child abduction. Progress.”

Rip pressed his palms flat against the tabletop. “First we need to devise how to abduct him from underneath the noses of his private guard.”

“And don’t forget the army of ATOM robots,” Ray reminded him.

Rip glanced at Len and said, “we’re going to need an accomplished thief.”

“Well,” Ray heaved another sigh, “while you’re kidnapping baby Hitler, Professor Stein and I will sabotage the robot army.”

“I call Team Robot Army,” Jax said.

“Isn’t that a waste of time?” Sara asked.

Ray shook his head slowly. “Not for the Kasnian citizens who are tormented by my technology.”

“That technology leads to Savage’s rise to power,” Rip pointed out figurally and pointed to Ray literally, “good backup plan.”

“I have a better one.” I used my cane to get back on my feet and told Gideon to bring up information on the Armageddon virus. “It isn’t the kid or Savage who destroys the world. It’s the superflu. If you want to solve the larger problem here, we should take biological warfare off the menu.”

“How exactly do you plan to destroy the Armageddon virus, Mrs. Snart?” Rip wanted to know.

I shrugged. “It’s at the corporate headquarters,” I said, “because they haven’t prepared their method of global dispersal yet. Savage had plans to test the virus on Bana-Mighdall.” Apparently the Amazons had taken over Egypt in the future because their island had sunk at the turn of the twenty-second century, but that was a whole other thing. “I can break in without triggering the alarm system using fulgurkinesis,” I clarified, “and Len has a cold gun. I doubt the superflu can survive at absolute zero.”

“All we have to do is freeze the virus,” Len said in his smoothest voice, “problem solved.”

“I guess that means I’m on Team Kidnapping.” Lisa arched one eyebrow at Rip. “After all, you said you’d need an accomplished thief.”

“Fine,” Sara held up one hand and called dibs on: “Team Kidnapping.”

Rip actually did a fistpump. I might’ve gaped a little bit. “Go team,” he said.

* * *

I had to bite the inside of my cheek to stop myself from laughing when I overheard Lisa flirting outrageously with Rip and Sara while they kidnapped a wannabe despot. Luckily they both knew it didn’t mean anything.

“No litter,” Len murmured in my ear as we took our time walking along the canal before we arrived at the corporate headquarters. “No street crime. No smog. How soon can we leave?”

I snorted and handed him a pair of goggles that would let him see what I saw when I had access to their network. “I happen to like the lack of smog,” I retorted.

Len unfolded the frame and put the goggles on. “ _Yes_ ,” he smirked and drew the sibilant out ecstatically.

I blushed when raw heat coiled at the base of my spine, but shook it off. I had other things to do besides my husband; no matter how much his voice turned me on.

“Mac,” Lisa cut in over the radio from aboard the Waverider, “you were right. Apparently removing Per Degaton from the timeline doesn’t change anything.”

“How is your backup plan progressing?” Rip asked.

“Tor Degaton sent his goon squad to find Little Lord Fauntleroy and left the RoboCops to guard this place,” Len told him, “like I said, the picking’s easy.”

Here’s the thing: I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a cakewalk. There hadn’t been an illegal metahuman in Kasnia in approximately half a century, so they didn’t have power dampers that weren’t surgically implanted in people who’d consented to the procedure in order to live within the borders of the conglomerate. I used my powers and manipulated their surveillance system to make it look as if we didn’t exist. Nobody saw us coming. Nobody saw us leave, either.

Here’s another thing, though: I’d also be lying if I said it all went according to plan.

I got us into the restricted part of the building with hazardous warning signs everywhere to warn us not to poke the bioweapons. Len flat out refused to let me anywhere near the virus. I couldn’t even argue with his logic, because I was immunocompromised and it was basically superpowered flu. I killed time by eavesdropping on Sara talking to Mick, his responses to her attempts at making conversation fuzzy over the radio because he didn’t have access to our frequency. Not anymore.

“Only reason I’m in here is,” Mick said in a slow, dangerous voice, “if I get out, I’m gonna give Snart some payback he’s not walking away from.”

“He saved your life,” Sara retorted.

“He wussed out on killing me,” Mick snarled. “Not the same thing. He _marooned_ me.”

“It’s not like he had many choices,” Sara pointed out. “He’s your friend, a loyal one. You should know that.”

“Well,” said Mick in a voice that oozed bitterness and sarcasm like a dark steady drip of molasses, “thank you. I’ll work it out with him as soon as I can.”

I sighed. Mick was still pissed. Not that I’d expected him to get over lifetimes of being taken apart by the Time Masters after a day in a holding cell, but I had hoped he wouldn’t want my husband dead anymore. I didn’t think Mick actually wanted to kill Len, though. Mick, Bea, and I had anger issues in common, and one way or another, we’d all learned how to use that anger instead of stewing in our impotent rage. Mick was pissed off no matter what, but focusing on how Len had betrayed him kept him from dealing with the spark that had ignited his anger issues—which was that he’d hated himself since his family farm burned to ashes when he was a teenager. After all, anger was depression turned inwards.

Anyhow.

There was no virus in the building. That dispersal method I mentioned before was airborne, meant to fall to earth from satellites looming a thousand miles away in low-earth orbit. I could’ve sabotaged them, but Savage had a failsafe that would release the virus upon re-entry no matter what. Once the contagion entered the atmosphere, it’d be Armageddon. I couldn’t launch the satellites out of LEO, either, because aliens existed in the DC universe and I couldn’t risk destroying a different planet to save the earth. There was no way to change this future. 

I felt a familiar heavy weight that churned my stomach and settled in my guts. I’d been a failure before; I would be a failure again. It didn’t feel like this. It didn’t salt the open wound or scorch the earth. I didn’t ugly cry. I threw myself at Len when he came within my reach and buried a muffled scream in the fabric of his shirt over his sternum. Len cradled the back of my head in one hand and smoothed the other from the small of my back along my spine to the nape of my neck, up and down, the motion slow and soft despite the rough callouses on his hands.

“Oh,” I whispered, “cold comfort.”

Len snorted and kissed the crown of my head, bittersweet. Until he did that, I hadn’t realized I was thinking out loud. “Sorry,” he whispered, even though he had nothing to apologize for.

I snuggled close enough to knock my glasses askew, so I had to let go and adjust them to avoid breaking the plastic frames. “I know you haven’t been to see Mick since we locked him up,” I whispered back. “I think you should get over yourself and talk to him. Whatever else has happened, he loves you and you love him back. That’s worth fighting for, isn’t it?”

Len didn’t answer my question. Instead he hunched to kiss my forehead and took his hands off me. “Time to go,” he said in his calmest, deadliest voice.

Then, we left the building as if we had never been there at all.

* * *

Per Degaton had been knocked out cold and he was dreaming about baking cookies with his mother when we returned to the ship. Until we heard the telltale sound of a hatch opening, the sleek exhale of a compact jet engine starting, and a _whoosh_ like a sucker punch that had missed its target as the jump ship took off.

“What was that?” Sara wanted to know.

“That,” Jax told her, “was our jump ship taking off.”

“How could Per Degaton have escaped?” Martin wondered.

Ray glanced at me as I shuffled down the ramp and into command central. “Gideon,” he said, “who else is on the jump ship?”

“It’s being piloted by Captain Hunter,” xe informed him.

“Who just turned off his transponder,” Jax added when he saw that Gideon had lost the signal from the erstwhile jump ship.

Sara heaved a sigh. “Sounds like someone doesn’t want us following him,” she deduced before she went to find Kendra, who’d been hiding in their room and trying to keep Savage from sensing her all day.

“Why?” Martin wanted to know.

Lisa huffed and flipped her hair, flat-ironed for this mission, over her shoulder. “Because he doesn’t want us stopping him from doing what my jerk brother said and killing the little bastard.”

I probably could’ve remotely accessed the controls on the jump ship and turned the signal back on, but then Ray left command central. I shuffled after him into the hallway. Not that I wanted to add fuel to the flame that had lit the torch he was carrying for me, but he was my friend and we’d lived together for almost a year. I knew he was hurting from the look on his face. Ray, like a picture book about giving a moose a muffin, was easy to read.

“Okay,” I yawned through the _oh_ sound, “what’s wrong?”

Ray turned to face me and slumped with the sideways line of his body against the wall. “I’m married,” he told me like he couldn’t believe the words were coming out of his mouth, “or I will be. I met my great-great-great-great-granddaughter today. I thought I had a child I never knew about with Norma back in 2016, but then she told me that her great-great-great-grandfather was born in 2018.”

I shifted my weight off my bad ankle. “Then why do you look so sad?”

“Savage is going to use my technology to destroy the world,” Ray said, “and I can’t stop thinking about how in two years someone is going to love me enough to marry me and have children with me. That’s what’s wrong.”

“Well,” Len splayed his fingers across the small of my back and pressed his palm flat over the base of my spine, “if it means you won’t be looking at my wife with your big brown goo-goo eyes, then you should keep thinking whatever you’re thinking, Raymond.”

“Len,” I warned him, “don’t.”

“It’s fine,” Ray told me before he shifted his focus to Len, “you think I don’t know Mac wasn’t herself in 1958? I might be oblivious sometimes, but I’m a smart guy. I doubt she spent most of her time crying and hating herself in the present. I know it wasn’t real, and I know she wouldn’t have wanted to share that life with me, but I needed to feel something other than scared, or depressed, or alone. Kendra was pining for Sara, and your sister would’ve stabbed me with a kitchen knife or her spike heeled shoes—whichever was more convenient—so it’s not like I had other options.”

I made a soft, indignant noise. There was a part of me that wanted to be wanted. Not by Ray specifically, but knowing somebody wanted me was an odd sort of validation that I craved. I hadn’t unlearned that yet. Don’t judge me.

Ray gave me a tentative grin. “I didn’t fall for Mac,” he told Len, “I fell for a lesser version of her because I thought she needed me.”

“I needed a friend,” I clarified, “I told you that.”

Ray grinned wider. “‘I have been, and always shall be, your friend,’” he said, quoting Spock. Ironically, this was from the scene in which he and Kirk had said _the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few_. Which didn’t exactly end well for Spock—at least not until the sequel—but that was neither here nor there.

I smiled and quoted Spock back to him. “‘Live long and prosper.’”56

That’s when the Neo-Nazi knockoffs attacked. Len caught me when the Waverider shook and I wobbled, but we didn’t go down. I felt the weapons systems fail, and then the shields fell.

“Why isn’t xe firing back?” Len snarled.

“It’s Tor Degaton,” I told him, “his goons sabotaged our weapons systems.”

Ray extracted his exosuit from his pocket. “We don’t need weapons,” he pointed out.

“Yes,” said Martin from the other end of the hallway. “We have superpowers.”

I didn’t bother to walk. I propped my cane against the wall and flew out through the open hatch instead. There were ATOM robots converging on the battleground from every direction until I sabotaged their guidance systems so they destroyed each other in midair. Then I shifted my focus to their guns and overloaded the fuel chambers so their weapons exploded in their gloved hands. I wasn’t in the mood to be nice to my enemies today. Not after losing ten months of my life to this mission, to our quest to end a man who’d had me tortured and tried to kill me.

Len shot one of the goons before he crouched to scoop up a grenade. “I think this is yours!” he shouted and smirked when he threw it back.

“I know we never actually went on a honeymoon,” I told him over the radio, “but I think it would’ve been eerily similar to this.”

“Nah.” Len shot a goon who’d been coming up behind Lisa, who simultaneously shot a goon sneaking up behind him. “If we were on our honeymoon, we would’ve robbed the Louvre and I’d be going down on you while you looked at Rubens’ _Education of the Princess_ from the hotel bed.”

I giggled. I couldn’t help it! “Only _Education of the Princess_ and not the whole Marie de’ Medici cycle?” I teased. Stealing all twenty-four paintings at once was on his bucket list. I doubted he’d settle for one of them even with me naked and waiting for him in a hotel bed on his mind.

“Ugh,” Lisa rolled her eyes and shot another goon, “you know we can hear you guys, don’t you?”

I hadn’t known I’d opened that particular communication to anyone else. Whoops. “Nope,” I stretched the _oh_ sound out into an awkward _ooh_ , “that’s my bad, sorry not sorry.”

Tor Degaton had brought a hundred goons—ten units of guardsmen—to fight us. Half of those had been taken out by the time my feet touched the ground again. With the combined efforts of Captain Cold, Golden Glider, White Canary, Hawkgirl, the Atom, Firestorm, and me, that number dropped until only the unit protecting Tor Degaton and Savage was left.

Unfortunately, at some point during the fight Savage had gotten ahold of Sara. I couldn’t risk zapping him or paramagnetizing the knife in his hand, because doing either could’ve killed her. I made a frustrated noise and let the lightning slither over my bare forearms

“What do you want?” Kendra asked, her voice pitching higher in distress.

Savage caught it and glanced down at the assassin whose throat he was holding a knife to, absorbing that information. “I want to exchange this woman for that dagger,” his gaze flicked to the scabbard on her thigh, “and your captain, Rip Hunter.”

That’s when Rip himself returned holding Per Degaton at gunpoint. It was all very dramatic. “I have a better idea,” he said, “her life in exchange for his. Your son will be returned to you as soon as you guarantee our safe passage.”

Per Degaton told his father not to do it, but what father would’ve listened? Not even Lewis Snart would’ve sacrificed one of his children, and he was an abusive piece of human garbage. Savage had a son and two daughters in the comics, all told. I wondered if he would sacrifice them to save himself. I figured he wouldn’t hesitate.

Tor Degaton snatched the knife from Savage and ordered his goons to put down their weapons. Savage let Sara go and glowered as Kendra wrapped her arms around her girlfriend, glaring cursed daggers at him.

“Better find yourself a new mentor, kid.” Len warned Per Degaton. It sounded like a threat, but I knew him well enough to know he was doing what he thought was right.

* * *

Gideon had made a birthday cake for me when we returned to command central and xe spewed digital confetti that flickered out in midair, not unlike the sparks I threw off sometimes. Len said he had to take a leak, but I knew he was going to talk to his partner in crime.

Lisa stole a bottle of cognac from the captains’ quarters. I arched my eyebrows at her. Lisa shrugged, one shoulder hunching as she cocked her head. “I know you can’t drink,” she gave me a sympathetic look and poured herself a glass, “but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun without you.”

I rolled my eyes at her and ate my cake while I tuned into the remix of “Hot ‘n’ Cold” going on aboard the Waverider. I took the lack of radio silence as permission to eavesdrop.

“What do you want?” Mick asked in a slow, burning voice.

“Mac seems to think we should have a heart to heart,” Len told him.

“We don’t have hearts,” Mick retorted. “Where does that leave us?”

“I’ve got a dozen reasons for killing you,” Len said in the calm voice that meant he was trying not to lose his cool, “you’ve got a dozen and one for killing me, so…”

“…all the talk in the world’s not gonna change anything,” Mick growled.

“Exactly,” Len deadpanned. “Here’s my proposal: I open this cell, we let our fists do the talking.”

“Oh,” I groaned around a mouthful of cake. “Oh no.”

Here’s the thing: Len and Mick had a tradition of settling disagreements with fights to the death, hyperbolically speaking. They’d fought “to the death” over the last Pop-Tart, the last piece of my pumpkin cheesecake at Thanksgiving, the last surviving beer in the fridge on Super Bowl Sunday, the last doughnut on the last day of Hanukkah, the last piece of fudge leftover after Christmas…it went on and on until I made a No Fights on Family Holidays rule. Hell, the whole concept was flawed because Lisa always ate whatever goodie they’d been fighting over while they were busy beating the crap out of each other.

Anyhow.

“What happens when I kill you?” Mick asked. Not _if_ , but _when_. Lifetimes of training with the Time Masters at the Vanishing Point had given him power and strength he didn’t have before.

“Then you take the jump ship, make your escape, and live the rest of your life anywhere you like,” Len told him.

“Huh,” Mick turned that idea over in his mind, “and if you kill me, well, it’s better than being locked up here in this place like some kind of circus freak.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Len said in his calmest, deadliest voice.

“Sound the bell,” Mick snarled.

I could hear the difference in the blows they dealt. Len wasn’t scrawny like he had been when they met as teenagers, hadn’t seen himself as small in years, but Mick was an inch taller and he outweighed him by thirty pounds. I knew his voice well enough to hear it when he took a hit, to overhear the broken sound of his body hitting the floor. I sighed and shuffled out of command central with a plate of cake balanced on the bend of one elbow. Sometimes it was obvious I’d spent two years waitressing. I told the mechanized door to open and watched Mick lower his clenched fist, a frustrated noise thrumming in the back of his throat.

I’d been punched in the face before. That’s how I knew my husband was going to have two black eyes, a fractured jaw, and a broken nose if Gideon didn’t intervene.

“We had a deal, Mick.” Len winced at how much it hurt to inhale. “Kill me and you walk. It’s what you want, isn’t it? To get off the team?”

Mick glanced up at me, standing in the doorway with a slice of birthday cake, and heaved a defeated sigh. “I don’t know what I want anymore,” he said. “Truth is, it doesn’t matter.”

Len flicked his tongue out to lick at the blood congealing in one corner of his lips. “What’re you talking about?” he wanted to know.

“Whether I stay or leave,” Mick sighed again, “I’m dead. We’re all dead.”

That’s when I opened the door to his cell. “If you carry Len to the med bay I’ll give you cake,” I told him. “Then you’re going to explain what the hell you mean by that.”

Mick nodded once, slowly. “I missed chocolate,” he told me before he picked Len up bridal style like my husband was a damsel in distress. Then, quietly: “missed you, too.”

That was good enough for me, especially after Gideon fixed the fractured jaw, black eyes, and broken nose. Mick had also cracked three of his ribs, and broken one that had punctured his lung. No wonder Len couldn’t breathe. If we hadn’t brought him to the med bay, he would’ve died of a tension pneumothorax. If he’d wanted to, Mick could’ve beaten my husband to death. I would’ve been scared, but no matter how strong he was, he wouldn’t survive if I stopped his heart in his chest. That was comforting, in a twisted way—cold comfort, again.

Anyhow.

“Since I’ve failed to bring you in,” Mick explained once the team had assembled in command central, “the Time Masters wanna bring me back in. They’re not gonna take any chances. They’re called the Hunters, mercenaries, and unlike me there isn’t a human part left in them.”

“So they want to lock us all up in the Vanishing Point,” Ray assumed.

“No,” Mick shook his head again, “the Hunters do one thing: kill. Whenever. Wherever.”

I had to bite the inside of my cheek to force myself not to sing out _we’re meant to be together, I’ll be there, and you’ll be near, and that’s the deal, my dear_. 57 Totally inappropriate, but I was at the point of exhaustion where everything was song lyrics. Don’t judge me.

“They’ll stop at nothing to make sure each and every one of us is erased from the face of history,” Mick continued.

“Do you have any suggestions as to how we might outsmart them, Mr. Rory?” Rip asked.

Mick answered, “Run.”

* * *

**Scene VI**  
Departure of the Hero 

* * *

Despite being romanticized in stories involving gunslinger cowboys and racist stereotypes about savagery, the American Old West was totally gross. There were fleas, lice, vague fevers, smallpox, and dysentery. People ate from communal platters, drank from communal tin cups, and cleaned themselves with communal towels and toothbrushes. Grass or corncobs were used instead of toilet paper, because even though Chinese people had used paper for “toilet purposes” since medieval times, Western culture didn’t get with the program until the nineteenth century. Joseph Gayetty commodified his “medicated paper for your water-closet” in 1857. Seth Wheeler patented the idea of perforated toilet paper on a roll in 1883. This all happened in New York. That progress didn’t get to the Western Frontier until years later. There was no shampoo, either. Indian people had been using चाँपो—phonetically _chāmpo_ , which literally translated as “massage the head and hair”—since 1762. Europeans didn’t steal that genius idea until the turn of the twentieth century, but that was neither here nor there. Vegetables didn’t grow. Disease was everywhere. Women had no rights or personhood. Indoor plumbing wasn’t a thing, so people crapped and pissed in outhouses or latrines. It was disgusting.

I’d watched _Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid_ and assorted Spaghetti Westerns starring Clint Eastwood with my dad when I was a kid on Earth-33. I’d also taken a class on Women in Western Literature, in which we read the prolific Mary Hunter Austin—whom Rip actually took his fake surname from because he had a thing for Westerns before he became a Time Master—and I wrote my final paper about how Dulcie Adelaid stabbing a dude for having an affair with the woman and then leaving her in the desert was totally justified because it was a metaphor for how men shouldn’t fuck around with Mother Nature. I knew enough about Westerns to know they were for dudes, and I had zero tolerance for stories about men after spending four years studying English literature.58

Anyhow.

Salvation, Texas wasn’t changing my mind about Westerns. On the bright side, we were nowhere near the Battle of Blanco Canyon against the Comanche going on in West Texas the same day we arrived. It was October tenth, 1871. On the darker side, I had to wear a chemise, a corset, a garter belt and stockings, a crinoline, and open-crotch bloomers underneath my dress. Yeah, panties weren’t a thing in 1871. Undergarments were still elaborate to the point that nineteenth century women’s fashion annihilated the argument that women who dressed a certain way were asking for it, but I digress.

Rip flailed out of his seat and loosed a dull roar when we arrived, but calmed down after he was on his feet. “It’s been quite a while since I’ve time jumped far enough to experience side effects…” he thought out loud and grabbed his left hand with his right to stop a spasm, “…fond memories.”

“I can’t feel my face!” Jax exclaimed.

“Fine feel I.” Len frowned when he heard the words he’d said out of order.

“Linguistic dysplasia,” Rip told him. “That should pass shortly.”

Len turned and looked at me, his face crumpling up in confusion. “Better it now,” he said.

“…am I the only one who can’t feel my face?” Jax wanted to know.

“I can’t feel my…” Ray gnawed on his lower lip and failed in his attempt to discretely fold his hands over his crotch, “…I better not say.”

“Mr. Rory appears unaffected,” Martin observed.

Mick had been taking a nap, apparently. “What’s going on?” he asked in a deep, groggy voice. “We time jump?”

“Yeah,” said Lisa, her golden complexion tinted gray. “We time jumped.”

“But where to,” Sara unfolded herself from her seat and moved to look at the tabletop screen, “is the better question.”

“Salvation, Texas circa 1871,” Rip told her.

Here’s the thing: Salvation, Texas was actually created by a novelist with a myriad of pseudonyms on Earth-33. It ended up being part of the DC universe in “Goin’ Back to Texas in a Box,” an issue of _Jonah Hex_ about murderous nuns, but that’s another story.59

I covered my mouth to mitigate the overwhelming nausea. At least we hadn’t traveled back to a time in which the Emancipation Proclamation wasn’t a thing. It still wouldn’t be safe for Kendra or Jax here—or Len, if they found out that he was what people in 1871 would’ve classified as _mulatto_ —but no one would mistake them for slaves.

Ray sighed dreamily. “I can’t believe it,” he stuffed his hands in his pockets and bounced a little bit in excitement, “the Old West.”

“This isn’t going to work,” Mick said.

“This,” Rip replied tersely, “will buy us time. We can hide out here while the Hunters search the other fragmentations.”

“What if they decide to check this place first?” Mick asked.

Rip opened his mouth, then closed it because he had no comeback for that.

“You know,” Kendra folded her arms and gave Rip a judgmental look behind his back, “feel free to loop us in whenever it’s convenient.”

“As you’ve seen,” Rip said as he turned to face her, “time doesn’t operate as is generally thought. It wants to happen. It takes time to harden—”

“That’s what she said,” I blurted.

Len snorted and wrapped an arm loosely around my waist, curling his fingers into the flesh of my hip through my skirt and leggings with a lovely sort of pressure. I let him pull me against his side and surreptitiously put my hand in the back pocket of his jeans, helping myself to a handful of his ass. I didn’t have to look at his face to know he was smirking.

“—the timeline is unclear on occasion,” Rip continued as if I hadn’t made him into the butt of a terribad innuendo, “constantly in flux.”

“Hence the difficulty locating Savage throughout history,” Martin deduced.

Rip nodded. “Indeed,” he said, “now one of the other interesting notions of time travel is the existence of fragmentation—”

“Temporal blind spots,” Mick interrupted him to explain, “specific places and times the Time Masters can’t see.”

“Salvation and its surrounding environs are located within one of these fragmentations,” Rip told us.

“So basically we’re hiding out in the Old West and hoping your bogeymen won’t find us here,” Len deadpanned.

Mick sighed. “Hunters are not bogeymen,” he retorted, “and you better hope they don’t find us.”

“Well,” Ray grinned wider, “at least not until I get a chance to punch a few doggies or bust a bronco or two!”

I arched my eyebrows at him. Jax gave him a look that said _What the fuck, man?_ without saying anything at all. Sara and Lisa both side-eyed him, their judgement oozing into the stale air that occupied command central. Kendra gaped, incredulous with a sprinkle of horrified. One thing I’d learned about her in 1958: she loved animals, especially puppies. All dogs, of course, were puppies to Kendra. That was something we had in common.

“Not that I condone animal cruelty!” Ray insisted. “It’s just that I watched a lot of Westerns as a kid…”

“Alas,” Rip said without a hint of remorse, “you’ll have to enjoy the Old West from in here, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, come on!” Sara pouted, doing her best impression of a girl who didn’t put the “dead” in drop dead gorgeous. “What’s the harm in us just taking a look around?”

“With this group?” Martin shook his head dubiously. “Clearly you haven’t been paying attention.”

Ray made a soft, petulant sound. “If I’m in the Old West and I don’t get to look around,” he said, “I’m going to kick myself.”

“I could help with that,” Len told him.

“I could help you help him,” Lisa offered with a sweet, poisonous smile.

Mick glanced at Rip. “I’ll keep an eye out,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’ll be a good boy.”

* * *

I didn’t want to take a look around the Old West. I was immunocompromised and I didn’t want to get sick. Luckily the fourth cholera pandemic didn’t hit Texas, because that state wasn’t close enough to the Mississippi River for infection to spread there. Approximately fifty thousand people died of cholera in between 1870 and 1873, out of a population of thirty-eight and a half million in the country. It was localized to ports on the Mississippi River or its tributaries, so that wasn’t my problem. Still, infectious diseases weren’t my jam. Only the knowledge that Gideon could ostensibly cure any ills we might encounter stopped me from panicking about smallpox and typhoid fever.

Len twirled his cowboy hat on one finger and watched me put my dress on. I knew him well enough to know he was thinking about how to undress me later, especially the challenge of getting under my skirt with a crinoline and bloomers and chemise underneath. I wasn’t wearing any panties, which didn’t help. Neither did the black duster he was wearing over a dark three-piece suit. I had a thing for him in anything, but suits in particular did it for me. This excursion was going to be an exercise in sexual frustration, I could tell.

I thought about taking off my engagement ring and wedding band, because Texas had passed its first anti-miscegenation law in 1837 and it wasn’t repealed until 1967. Some of the states in the South had legalized interracial marriage during Reconstruction, though. Len was passing for white and it was possible that our marriage wasn’t illegal at this point in time, so I turned the diamond around instead.

Kendra wore a leisure dress over the same elaborate undergarments for historical accuracy, but Sara and Lisa decided to wear pants instead. Ray compared his outfit to Wyatt Earp, one of the lawmen involved in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881. Which hadn’t technically happened yet. Jax and Martin both decided to wear bowler hats, also for historical accuracy.

Walking into the town of Salvation in a big group got us noticed. Ray wearing a pristine white dress shirt with a pointy winged collar under his coat and vest didn’t help, because the combination implied that he had money. I hoped his goofy grin wouldn’t make him a target for thieves who weren’t members of our team.

Anyhow.

Mick found a saloon and opened the pink doors in homage to Aragorn in _Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers_. I wondered if the color was significant—if pink meant the saloon was also a bordello, which in turn would mean the rooms upstairs were boudoirs for sexytimes—and smiled when one of the barmaids winked at Lisa.

“Remember we’re just here to get the lay of the land,” Martin said. “No trouble.”

“Yeah,” Sara deadpanned. “That’ll happen.”

Mick scoffed and demagnetized from the group. “I need a drink,” he muttered.

“Wow,” said Ray in a voice that oozed with excitement, “a real old-timey saloon.”

I found a chair and flopped into it, unencumbered by a bustle like the barmaids had on underneath their dresses. Sara joined Mick at the bar and Kendra followed, only to decide that she didn’t want to get drunk off her ass trying to keep up with her girlfriend.

That’s when a little boy hugged her, wrapping his arms around her knees. “Kate!” he said, not using his inside voice, “nǐ hǎo!”

“Jason Yingjie Hex!” a pretty Chinese woman shouted at him, scolding him with his name like only a mother could.

Jason, the little boy, untangled himself from her skirts and gave his mother a sheepish look. “Sorry, mama,” he said. “Sorry, Kate.”

Here’s the thing: Jonah Hex debuted in the comics in 1972 and he was written as the archetypal Western antihero. At one point he was drawn in homage to the Man with No Name, Clint Eastwood’s character in _A Fistful of Dollars_ , _For a Few Dollars More_ , and—Ray’s favorite— _The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly_. Jason Hex 60 was his son with his ex-wife Meiling Hex,61 a first generation Chinese-American immigrant whose father and brother were murdered in San Francisco before she met him.

Here’s another thing: Katherine Manser62 and Hannibal Hawkes63 were the Old West versions of Kendra and Carter in the comics. Meiling knew the Arrowverse versions of Kate and Hannibal intimately. Jonah had divorced her in 1866, when Jason was four. After that, she’d met Kate and Hannibal and they’d pursued her as a couple—as they’d done in a few lifetimes when their relationship chafed without them opening things up—but more on that later.

Mick challenged Sara to a drinking contest, which I knew wouldn’t end well. I saw Lisa taking the barmaid who’d winked at her upstairs. I figured as long as there was penicillin and futuristic cures for present-day STIs on the ship, she’d be safe. Martin sat down at a table near the chair I was occupying and bought himself into a poker game.

Len smiled at me without baring his teeth before he shifted his focus to the professor. “Didn’t know you played cards,” he said in his smoothest voice.

“Like you, Mr. Snart, I am an enigma.” Martin put a fistful of dollars in the middle of the table. “Raise.”

That won him the hand. Len smiled wider. “I’m impressed,” he said. I knew him well enough to know he meant it.

“My father was what some might call a degenerate gambler. Others would say criminal,” Martin told him, “when I was old enough he’d pull me in on some of his schemes. I picked up a thing or two at a few of the card tables he frequented. Then I took a different path,” he placed his bet and glanced over his shoulder to see me yawning into the hollow of my palm, “like father, like son isn’t always inevitable, Mr. Snart.”

It occurred to me that while Ray apologized for assuming Len would hurt me because his father was abusive, to my knowledge the professor never had. This wasn’t an apology, not explicitly, but it was exactly what Len needed to hear. That was good enough for me.

Martin won another hand. Unfortunately one of the other players didn’t seem to enjoy losing at poker.

“I had a full boat,” he said.

I figured that was a full house, but full disclosure: I knew nothing about poker hands beyond royal flushes, and I knew about that because I’d seen the remake of _The Parent Trap_ starring Lindsey Lohan four basquillion times. I’d never actually played poker. Len offered to teach me once, but he’d wanted to play clothing optional, and I said no because we’d only had five dates. I was still overwhelmed by the idea of somebody wanting me for real, especially someone I’d loved before I knew he was real. Don’t judge me.

“As did I,” Martin told him, “full of kings. Which beats your pair of queens.”

That’s when a woman set a glass of whiskey down on the edge of the table next to the sore loser and he grabbed her arm. “Don’t I look busy to you?” he asked her.

I clenched my fist in the fabric of my skirt and glared at the sore loser. Once he let go, I was going to electrocute him. I didn’t want to kill him, but I could make him wet his pants.

“I’m sorry,” the barmaid answered, “I—”

“If you spill another drop of that whiskey,” said the sore loser, “you will be.”

“Just because you’re losing doesn’t mean you have to pick on the waitstaff,” Martin told him with an edge of disgust in his voice.

“Why don’t you mind your own business, grandpa?” the sore loser retorted.

Martin stood, the legs of his chair scraping over the floorboards. “Unhand the lady,” he said.

“Okay,” Len sighed, “now, now, boys, let’s just take it easy.”

I felt him draw his revolver and heaved a sigh of my own. This was going to end in a barfight, I could tell.

“Well.” Martin flailed one hand at my husband. “When my friend here is being reasonable, you know we have a problem.”

“I’m not the one with a problem,” said the sore loser, “you are.”

That’s when he drew his own gun, but he never got a chance to pull the trigger. Len shot him in cold blood and everyone in the room heard the sound of the gunshot ricocheting through the saloon.

“You…” Martin faltered. “You killed him.”

“You’re welcome,” Len snarked back.

I stayed in my seat as the barfight started and generated a dense magnetic field to keep anyone from getting anywhere near me. I didn’t have the energy to fight, not that day. Meiling shooed Jason behind the bar and kicked a poor, unfortunate soul in the head. Mick was passed out on top of the counter, drooling a little bit on the unpolished wood. Kendra fought with her, falling into old habits. I’d say they fought shoulder to shoulder if I were in a hyperbolic mood, but Meiling was an inch or two shorter than I was, so it’d be more accurate to say they fought shoulder to elbow. Lisa vaulted over the bannister halfway down the staircase and landed on her feet, with the backs of two drunk men under her heels. I grinned when I noticed the barmaid she’d taken to bed knee a man first in the groin, then in the face.

Then another shot was fired. I rolled my eyes and stopped the bullet from making a hole in the floor of the boudoir above the barroom. Jonah Hex, of course, had been there the whole time. I’d noticed him even in the dark corner of the saloon, his face a dead giveaway.

“Playtime’s over,” Jonah said. “Anybody’s got a problem with that, they answer to me.”

Meiling snorted and took the shine off that melodramatic moment. Len offered me his hand and intertwined our fingers after I stood.

“Thank you,” Martin said, “Mr.…?”

“That’s Jonah Hex,” I blurted out before he could introduce himself, “didn’t the Mark of the Devil give it away?”

I knew no one else had read the comics, but if someone like Jonah Hex existed in this reality, I thought people might’ve learned about him in history class. I was right, but that was neither here nor there.

Jonah glanced at me, reconsidering whatever first impression he’d gotten of me when I’d sat down a few feet away from him fifteen minutes earlier. “You’re not from around here,” he said, “are you?”

“No,” Martin told him. “My friends and I are from…out of town.”

Jonah nodded, humoring Martin despite how terribad he was at lying. “Way out of town,” he said quietly.

Here’s the thing: Jonah and Meiling got divorced in 1866. Meiling took Jason from San Francisco to Salvation, where she’d met Kate and Hannibal. Jonah stayed in Oklahoma, and a year later he met a Time Master named Rip Hunter.

Rip became the captain of the Waverider ten years before he’d stolen the ship, and he’d met Jonah on his first solo mission. Jonah had almost been enough to make him give up his dream of being a Time Master. Rip stayed in 1867 until it became 1868, and he was forced to let go. Still, his first love had left enough of a mark. After all, Jonas Hunter was named for Jonah Hex.

I arched my eyebrows when Jonah told him that _his_ jacket suited Rip. There was no way that was platonic, no way in hell.

Ray took off his hat. “We might’ve gotten into a barroom brawl back in town,” he admitted.

“Well,” Rip huffed, “that was entirely predictable.”

“One of ’em poured lead into a member of the Stillwater gang,” Jonah explained.

“Mr. Rory,” Rip assumed.

“Snart, actually,” Ray told him.

“Ah,” said Rip, “that was going to be my next guess.”

I didn’t bother to point out that there were three Snarts on the ship. Lisa would’ve used liquid gold instead of lead bullets. I had fulgurkinesis and a more subtle kind of power. Len, Lisa, and Mick would all kill for me, because they loved me—if I ever wanted someone shot, I wouldn’t have to pull the trigger. I didn’t like Rip, but I knew he was smart enough to figure that out.

“This guy tried to kill Grey,” Jax pointed out. “Snart saved him.”

I smiled. Apparently both halves of Firestorm were on the winning side, our side. I’d married an unrepentant murderer. That didn’t change, but at least now he didn’t kill people who weren’t actively trying to hurt our people. I was cool with that.

I left the room to do my lady business and have Gideon scan me because I wasn’t taking any chances with airborne viral infections. I returned with no infectious diseases lurking inside me. That was a win.

“Leaving already?” Mick asked Rip.

“No,” Ray set his jaw in a stubborn line. “No. This town is being terrorized by the Stillwater gang,” he put his hat back on and eyed Rip from beneath the brim, “and I aim to do something about it.”

“You aim to?” Mick grinned. “You’re getting all native on us, haircut.”

Ray ignored him. “Look,” he said, “we signed onto this mission—”

“To stop Vandal Savage,” Rip reminded him harshly.

“To be heroes,” Ray retorted, “and saving a town from a marauding gang of criminals? That is what heroes do!”

Rip couldn’t argue, because Ray wasn’t wrong and he knew it. Jonah laughed, rueful. Mick grinned wider.

I, being neither a hero nor an Old West fanboy, made a garbage disposal noise and shuffled off to find my husband.

* * *

I found Len waiting in our room, still dressed up like a cowboy—wide-brimmed black hat and all. I reached out to grab the knot in the neckerchief he wore and kissed him when he let me pull him down. Len fisted one hand in my hair and kissed me back greedily, licking into my mouth and stealing all the air from my lungs. I was flushed and gasping after he broke the kiss and tugged my bottom lip between his teeth.

Len smirked and smoothed the hand in my hair out to cup my face. “Why don’t you have a seat, hmm?” he asked. “Time for your birthday present.”

I might’ve gulped. “It’s October here,” I pointed out. “It’s not my birthday anymore.”

“That’s true,” Len smirked wider, “but I missed your birthday when you were stuck in 1958. I promised you a striptease, and I always keep my promises.”

I gnawed on the inside of my cheek. “Wouldn’t you rather undress me?” I asked.

“I can undress you after I tease you,” Len said in that low, intimate voice, “and then I can tease you another way.”

“Hng…” I surrendered and flopped into the chair in front of the desk. I hadn’t lost, not really. This was a win-win situation—or it would be if I didn’t spontaneously combust from the awkwardness.

Len took his shoes and socks off first. There wasn’t really a sexy way to do that, so he just took them off without bothering to make it part of the striptease. Then he put the hat on my head and shucked the duster slowly before he dropped it onto the floor. That’s when the music started. At least it wasn’t “Ice Ice Baby”—if he’d stripped to that, I would’ve died laughing.

It wasn’t embarrassing to watch him strip for me. I was embarrassed by how into him I was. I blushed hot when he undid his cufflinks, put them on the desk, and untied the neckerchief; heat bloomed lush between my legs after the vest was on the floor and he’d unbuttoned his shirt halfway. Len smirked at how red I was and finally took his shirt off. I’d never seen him move his hips like that, but I knew intimately how it felt because that was the way he moved when he fucked me.

I stopped breathing when he unbuckled his belt and it fell to the floor with a loud _clank_ , the sound a shock to the system. Len dropped his pants and held my gaze while he played with the waistband of his boxer briefs. I broke eye contact and blushed hotter when I saw that doing this for me was turning him on. Len straddled my lap, tilted my face up, and kissed me softly.

“Okay!” I elongated the _oh_ sound into an _ooh_ after he broke the kiss, “I’ll blow you if you stop teasing me.”

Len smirked wider. “Only if you beg for it,” he told me lowly.

I made a soft, desperate noise. “Len, please,” I begged, “please let me suck your cock.”

Len helped me undress so I was in the stockings and garters and a corset with the chemise underneath. Then he took his boxers off and sat in the chair, spreading his thighs apart before I knelt in between them. I wrapped my hand around his cock, squeezing gently and giving his shaft an experimental stroke, flicking my tongue and tasting his precome. Len moaned for me when I swirled my tongue all around and sucked on the head of his cock. I sucked him harder and played with his balls, cupping his tight, heavy sac in my palm and teasing him with my fingertips. Len clutched at my hair with both hands, but he didn’t thrust himself inside of my mouth.

I hollowed out my cheeks and sucked him hard, swallowing around his cock and licking along the underside as I moved my head up and down his shaft. Len made a desperate sound, the muscles of his thigh clenching under the hand I wasn’t using to stroke his cock at the base. I giggled with him deep inside my mouth and felt the sound go straight through him. Len pulled my hair and fucked my face until he came in thick spurts that almost made me choke, his come spilling hot down my throat and into my hands. It wasn’t more come than usual, but I was surprised by how rough he was being, so I didn’t swallow as much.

I’d never made him lose control so completely. There was a part of him that was always holding back. I figured he was scared of hurting me because he didn’t trust himself to know where the line was between abuse and rough sex. That’s why he liked it when I explicitly asked for more, harder, rougher, please. That way he knew I could take whatever he wanted to give me.

Len stroked my hair while I licked up the mess he’d made. “Sorry,” he told me softly.

“Why?” I asked, my voice hoarse from getting my throat thoroughly fucked, “I’m not.”

“I love you,” Len said with slow vehemence, “I would _never_ hurt you.”

I turned to kiss the heel of his palm. “I know,” I told him softly, “you didn’t, and I would’ve stopped you if you were.”

Len scoffed. “How?” he asked.

“I learned to manipulate the electrical impulses in the brain to control minds in 1958,” I said, “if I’d wanted you to stop, I could’ve forced you.” That’s why I had stopped using my powers in the past: I’d literally fried someone’s brain. I didn’t kill the dude, but he was as good as dead after what I did to him. I would’ve felt bad about it, if the dude hadn’t been trying to kill me; but he was, so I didn’t. “I have superpowers, dude. I can literally kill you with my brain.”

I watched him process that information—which took him longer in the afterglow than it might’ve otherwise—and saw the moment his body unclenched, his fear of hurting me dying a little death. Len splayed his fingers over the span of my waist and stood with me before he tore the front busk of the corset open and yanked the chemise over my head.

“Seriously?” I giggled all over again. “What is this, a bodice ripper?”

Len cocked his head and dragged his heated gaze up and down my body. I kept giggling until he took a step forward.

I held my ground and tilted my head to look at him instead of stepping back. “I love you, too,” I reached out to wrap my arms loosely around his neck, “but if you’re still feeling sorry, you might want to get on your knees.”

“ _Yes_ ,” Len exhaled the word in a low, fervent hiss and lifted me onto the edge of the mattress before he buried his face between my legs.

Len using his tongue to make me come was my favorite kind of apology. Let’s put it that way.

* * *

Lisa spent the night in one of the boudoirs above the saloon with the barmaid while Mick was keeping watch for temporal anomalies. Sara and Kendra used money they fabricated to buy horses and rode out to Albano Gulch. Kate, Hannibal, Meiling, and Jason all lived in a valley down in that gulch, and Kendra wanted to meet her former self. Martin borrowed another paranormal romance novel from me, because apparently they had become addictive. Jax tried to figure out a way to adapt the speed of the ship to present-day automobiles by studying the engine and fuel intake and other car things I knew nothing about because I wasn’t a mechanic. Ray pretended he was John Wayne and some fool gave him a sheriff’s badge.

Martin had gone to the saloon the next morning to check on Lisa and he got there just in time to hear the gunshots heralding the return of the Stillwater gang.

Here’s the thing: I loved Ray, in a platonic sort of way. That didn’t mean I wasn’t aware of his flaws, especially after living with him for ten months. Ray could be arrogant sometimes, and despite his ability to think big when it came to technological advancements, in terms of morality he was smallminded. I ground my teeth when he told the Stillwater gang to leave town like that was a solution to the larger problem. Other people clapped and cheered when they rode off, dust flying as their horses galloped away. I didn’t clap or cheer because I knew we couldn’t put down roots in 1871, knew we couldn’t protect Salvation forever; nor could we protect whatever town the Stillwater gang was going to ransack after we ran them out of this one.

Ray didn’t get how the right thing for someone could be the wrong thing for someone else, or how doing the right thing might actually make things worse.

“Dude,” Jax flailed once we had returned to the Waverider, “that was badass!”

Lisa made a rude noise. I figured she’d drawn the same conclusion I had.

“Let’s not oversell it,” Len deadpanned.

“Yeah,” Ray ignored him, “running a bad guy out of town’s always been on my bucket list.”

Martin explained what a bucket list was to Jonah when we emerged from the hallway and entered command central. “Hope it’s a real short list, string bean,” he said to Ray.

“We can handle the Stillwater gang,” Ray told him.

“Well,” Rip said huffily from the archway that led into the captain’s quarters, “you’re all just tearing up the eighteen-seventies, aren’t you?”

I flopped into one of the lower chairs and winced. Luckily for me, people didn’t notice when you walk funny after rough sex if you’re crippled.

“Stillwater’s gang is like a hornet’s nest,” Jonah told him, “and your friends here just keep poking at ’em.”

“They saved the town from being raided, man,” Jax said defensively.

“Today,” said Jonah, “but what about tomorrow? Or the day after that? For a bunch of time travelers, you don’t seem to understand the future much,” he looked at Rip so intensely that something heavy and unspoken passed between them, “the day will come when y’all leave, and Salvation will end up like Calvert.”

I had to pee at the inopportune moment. I didn’t miss the exposition about how Rip had left Jonah in Calvert, Oklahoma to go back to the future, though. Gideon told me later, because xe and I were friends and xe liked talking to someone who spoke xyr language. Apparently when I talked to machines, I spoke metadata. Nifty.

* * *

After much tense arguing that involved Rip being cagily British and Jonah lowkey judging us for being fuckups in the future, they decided to find the Stillwater gang and arrest them all to make sure they didn’t raid another town instead of Salvation. On the bright side, at least someone agreed with me about why running them out of town was a bad idea. On the darker side, Jonah was a sexist asshole who didn’t want the women coming along. No wonder Meiling wanted a divorce.

Mick had grown up with horses. Unlike me, he rode without screaming internally. “Could’ve used Sara on this roundup,” he muttered.

“Another lady?” Jonah said in a voice that oozed skepticism. “You crazy?”

Lisa and I exchanged a look and snorted behind his back. Jonah wouldn’t stand a microscopic increment of a chance against any of the women on our team.

“Just remember we’re here to arrest Stillwater,” Ray said, “not kill him.”

“He always such a stick in the mud?” Jonah wondered in a whisper.

“Yes,” Mick answered without bothering to keep quiet.

There was an encampment far enough away from the ship that my ass felt like I’d tried to twerk all night and—as a girl so white I glowed in the dark without using fulgurkinesis—I had failed epically. Jonah fought like a demon, all hellfire and rage. Someone had the draw on Mick until Jax shot the gun out of his hand. I dismounted awkwardly, using my cane for balance, and zapped Stillwater unconscious after I found him behind a barrel. Ray offered me a fistbump. I pressed my knuckles against his, and we blew it up as a stray bullet ricocheted off my dense magnetic field.

Len rode up on a white horse while we were making blown up sound effects that sounded nothing like an actual explosion. “I married a nerd,” he said with such fondness that I got a little gooey.

“Yes,” I nodded solemnly. “Yes, you did.”

“You’re under arrest,” Ray said to the unconscious gang leader after he put the man on the horse. “You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney—”

“Won’t be Miranda rights for another hundred years,” Len snarked back.

Nobody but me cared that it was actually ninety-five years, since Miranda rights were made into law in 1966, but I digress.

One of the gang members we hadn’t arrested or otherwise incapacitated lassoed Jax and yanked him off his horse on our way out. I knew better than to leave a black kid alone with a bunch of lawless white men in 1871. I waited for everyone to fire their last bullets so I wouldn’t get distracted by flying metal when I fluxed the geomagnetic field and knocked our enemies back far enough to knock the wind out of them, if nothing else.

“What the hell was that?” Jonah wondered.

“That,” said Len with a grin I could hear in his smooth voice, “is the goddess I married.”

“I’m not actually a goddess,” I clarified when Jonah crossed himself, “and I’m not a witch either. I’m…” I had to dial it back to stop myself from saying _a fulgurkinetic metahuman_ , “…meta as hell.”

Jax untangled himself from the lasso and slowly got back on his feet, wincing at the pain in his knee and the bruises he was going to have later from being yanked off a galloping horse. “Thanks, Mac.”

“You’re welcome.” I eyed my horse balefully and turned back to Jax. “You should take my horse since yours got spooked,” I told him. “I think I’ll try defying gravity.”65

* * *

Stillwater was in our custody, but that did nothing to stop his gang of outlaws from raiding Salvation or any other town. Jonah suggested we set up a quick draw. I rolled my eyes at how cliché his plan was, but I had to admit he was right: these men would respect the winner of a shootout. I had to pee again—because that was what happened when you hydrated and I was drinking a copious amount of bottled water to avoid dysentery like a boss—and when I returned to command central I found everybody watching Rip talk to Jonah in the captain’s quarters. Rip stood facing the wall, tension in every line of his body, not quite concealed by the brown coat his first love had worn before.

“Something’s been bugging me all these years…” Jonah spoke to Rip with a tiny quiver in his voice that might’ve been vulnerability, but I didn’t know him well enough to tell for sure. “If you’d’ve known what Turnbull was gonna do to Calvert, would you still’ve left?”

Rip turned to face him with regret written all over his face. “That’s the thing, Jonah. I did know.”

That’s when Jonah punched him in the face so hard he fell back into an overstuffed armchair.

“I deserved that,” Rip told him.

“You deserve a lot worse!” Jonah snarled and pointed one accusing finger at him. “You knew and you still left?”

Rip unfolded himself from the armchair, wobbling a little from the physical and metaphysical force of the blow. “Of course I knew! I was a Time Master, and therein lay the problem!” he flailed an arm at the spectators, including me, “like Raymond, I felt the pull of heroism and this era’s penchant for being rife with opportunities to make a difference! That was…one of the things that called to me, and that is why I had to leave, because had I stayed…I could’ve no longer remained a Time Master.”

I remembered what he’d said after our first mission went horribly wrong: _a Time Master should be free of any personal entanglements that might compromise him_.

Len wrapped an arm around my shoulders and I leaned into him, smelling gunpowder and sweat and the sharp icy smell of his skin. Once upon a time, he’d left me because he was scared of being in love. I wondered if Rip felt the same way back in 1868.

“You fell in love,” I whispered. It was still the only sound in the awkward silence that had stretched to fill every nook and cranny of the spaceship, so everybody heard me.

“Yes,” said Rip in a quiet, broken voice, “but I’m no longer a Time Master. Which is why I’ll face Stillwater,” he squared his shoulders and turned back to face Jonah. “Send word to his posse. I believe high noon is in less than three hours.”

* * *

Kendra and Sara returned in time to watch the quick draw. Apparently they’d lost track of time in the gulch, and on their way back they’d met a Comanche woman on the road named Mábathuutsúu—which, literally translated, meant “tall bird.”65 I sat on the steps of the saloon, where I could see everyone and protect them in case of unfriendly fire. Lisa sat beside me, thigh to thigh and kneecap to kneecap. I put my head on her shoulder and she let me. What a shock, pun unintended.

Len held Stillwater at gunpoint until they stepped onto the dirt. Then, he handed over the revolver and went to stand in the peanut gallery, where I could keep an eye on him. Rip flipped his coat dramatically to uncover his holster. I’ll admit I fell asleep with my head on Lisa’s shoulder and woke up when the gunshots rang out. I blinked groggily and watched the gang riding off into high noon without their leader, who’d gotten himself shot.

That’s when our favorite assassin noticed three men in anachronistic armor had arrived. “I don’t think we’re done here yet,” Sara deadpanned.

“They found us,” Rip added, stating the obvious.

“Ah, friends!” Mick shouted and shot at the Hunters. “Welcome!”

Rip gave Ray his atomic exosuit and a plasma revolver to Jonah, who crossed himself again when he saw Firestorm take flight. Unfortunately our captain hadn’t thought to bring any of the superweapons we’d left on the ship to this gunfight.

“Traitor!” one of the Hunters growled at Mick.

“Not possible,” Mick retorted. “I was never on _your_ side. I was on _my_ side.”

Ray eviscerated one of the Hunters by shrinking and flying through his intestines. Mick, meanwhile, disemboweled another with a knife he’d stolen from him. I electrocuted the third, using the metal in his armor to conduct the current.

It was my first kill. I probably should’ve felt something, but I had no bad feelings. There was only a vicious gladness that I was keeping the people I loved safe from harm.

“Fool,” one of the Hunters said after Mick stabbed him in the shoulder, “the Time Masters have issued Omega Protocol…the Pilgrim’s coming for you all, Chronos…your deaths are only a matter of time.”

Those were his last words. Mick scoffed at his corpse and left him dead in the dirt. “Well,” he muttered, “that was easy.”

* * *

Rip said a bittersweet goodbye to Jonah, and I knew he’d ride on down the road to meet the love of his life. At least that’s what Gideon had told me when I asked xyr about his future. Kendra and Sara walked back to the Waverider hand in hand. Lisa, Ray, and Mick swept the battlefield for remnants of futuristic technology and carried the corpses of the Hunters away to where they’d be buried in unmarked graves without their weapons, armor, or clothes. It was disrespectful, but I gave no fucks because they’d been trying to murder us all. I sat on the steps of the saloon watching my husband walk through the empty battlefield to stand next to Rip, who’d been watching Jonah ride off into the past that’d be his future.

“I don’t supposed you’ve got one of those doohickeys that,” Len crooked his finger like he was pressing the button on a neuralyzer, “erases people’s memories or something.”

“No,” Rip said, “but skepticism and disbelief are a far more effective tool.”

“So if anybody here talks,” Len fell into step beside him as they walked towards where I was sitting, “nobody will believe them.”

Rip stopped in the middle of the street and turned to look at my husband. “Would you, Mr. Snart?” he asked.

I snorted. There was a time when he would’ve told himself this was a dream, a storm he’d brewed in his sleep. Not anymore. Len believed in a lot of things he hadn’t believed in before we met: love, metahumans, time travel, all that jazz.

“So where to now?” Lisa asked once we were all aboard the ship again.

“Or more specifically,” said Sara, “when?”

“Is there another fragmentation we can hide out in?” Kendra wanted to know.

“Unfortunately matters aren’t quite so simple,” Rip said apologetically.

Jax heaved a sigh and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “How’d I know you were gonna say something like that?”

“Janus told me the Time Masters have issued Omega Protocols on all of us,” Mick explained, “the worst kind of order they could give. They’ve sent the Pilgrim after us.”

“Who’s the Pilgrim?” Jax asked.

“She’s the Time Masters’ most deadly assassin,” Rip told him. “She will stop at nothing until each and every one of you are dead.”

“Ooh,” Lisa stretched the sound out into sardonic territory, “scary.”

Len swept his thumb over the base of my spine and I whimpered too softly for anyone else to hear as pleasure jolted through me. “Pretty sure we can handle ourselves,” he said in his smoothest voice.

“Indeed,” said Rip. “Which is why she won’t be going after the present day versions of you.”

“She’s hunting our younger selves,” Mick elaborated, “and she won’t stop until each and every one of us has been erased from the timeline.”

“Oh,” I blurted. “Oh, no.”

* * *

1\. Connor Hawke first appeared in _Green Arrow_ Vol.2, No.0 (“Cast Upon the Waters”) October, 1994.

2\. Sandra Hawke first appeared in _Green Arrow_ Vol.2, No.91 (“Images”) November, 1994.

3\. Lian Harper first appeared in _New Teen Titans_ Vol.2, No.21 (“Titans Hunt, Part 1: The Lesson”) June, 1986.

4\. Michelle Torres and her daughter first appeared in _Deadshot_ Vol.2, No.1 (“Urban Renewal, Part 1: Strings”) February, 2005.

5\. Susan Lawton first appeared in _Deadshot_ Vol.1, No.1 (“Die But Once”) November, 1988.

6\. Eddie Lawton first appeared in _Deadshot_ Vol.1, No.2 (“Suffer the Child”) December, 1988.

7\. White Canary first appeared in _Birds of Prey_ Vol.2, No.1 (“Endrun, Part 1 of 4: Without Breaking a Few Eggs”) July, 2010.

8\. Danny Brickwell first appeared in _Green Arrow_ Vol.3, No.40 (“New Blood, Part 1 of 6: Moving Day”) September, 2004.

9\. _X-Men: The Last Stand_ (2006).

10\. Eliza Harmon first appeared in _52_ Vol.1, No.17 (“Last of the Czarnians”) August, 2006.

11\. William Shakespeare, _Hamlet_ (1599) III.i.1751.

12\. _Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo_ (1984).

13\. Aretha Franklin, “Respect” from _I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You_ (1967).

14\. Grant Wilson first appeared in _New Teen Titans_ Vol.1, No.1 (“The New Teen Titans”) November, 1980.

15\. _Happy Days_ (1974-1984).

16\. Jade Nguyen first appeared in _New Teen Titans Annual_ Vol.1, No.2 (“The Murder Machine!”) August, 1983.

17\. Tora Olafsdotter first appeared in _Justice League International_ Vol.1, No.12 (“Who Is Maxwell Lord?”) April, 1988.

18\. Rhosyn Forrest first appeared in _Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane_ Vol.1, No.105 (“Death House Honeymoon!”) October, 1970.

19\. _Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope_ (1977).

20\. Seanan McGuire, _Midnight Blue-Light Special_ (2013) #2 in the _InCryptid_ series.

21\. Twelve Brothers in Silk first appeared in _Birds of Prey_ Vol.1. No.81 (“The Battle Within, Part 1: Undefended Border”) June, 2005.

22\. _Weird Science_ (1985).

23\. _My So-Called Life_ 1x01 (“Pilot”).

24\. Walt Whitman, “O Captain! My Captain!” from _Leaves of Grass_ (1855).

25\. _Dead Poets Society_ (1989).

26\. _Smallville_ 2x21 (“Accelerate”) 6 May 2003.

27\. Seanan McGuire, _Half-Off Ragnarok_ (2014) #3 in the _InCryptid_ series.

28\. _The Brave and the Bold_ Vol.1, No.34 (“Creature of a Thousand Shapes!”) May, 1945.

29\. The Isley Brothers, “Shout!” from _Shout!_ (1959).

30\. Seanan McGuire, _Pocket Apocalypse_ (2015) #4 in the _InCryptid_ series.

31\. Homer, _The Odyssey_ (8 BCE) X.dxiii.

32\. _Return of the Jedi_ (1983).

33\. _Superman_ Vol.2, No.153 (“Say Goodbye”) February, 2000.

34\. _Justice League of America_ Vol.1, No.3 (“The Slave Ship of Space!”) March, 1961.

35\. T. S. Eliot, _The Hollow Men_ (1925).

36\. The Kissing Case: ([x](http://www.npr.org/2011/04/29/135815465/the-kissing-case-and-the-lives-it-shattered)).

37\. Gallup’s Minority Rights and Relations poll: ([x](http://www.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-whites.aspx)).

38\. I based the Keystone City riots on the East St. Louis massacres IRL. Ida B. Wells reported that 40-150 black people were killed in the second riot, while the NAACP estimated that 100-200 people died in total.

39\. Ken Kesey, _One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest_ (1962).

40\. The Eagles, “New Kid in Town” from _Hotel California_ (1976).

41\. _Smallville_ 7x04 (“Cure”) 18 October 2007.

42\. _Gilmore Girls_ 1x14 (“That Damn Donna Reed”) 22 February 2001.

43\. Oscar Wilde, _The Decay of Lying_ (1891).

44\. Llamas with Hats: ([x](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJOwdrTA8Gw)).

45\. Norman Brawler first appeared in _Sword of the Atom Special_ Vol.1, No.1 (“The Atom’s Farewell”) March, 1984.

46\. Luca Loletti first appeared in _Gen 13_ Vol.2, No.6 (“Roman Holiday”) November, 1995.

47\. White Lightning first appeared in _Impulse_ Vol.1, No.4 (“Bad Influence”) July, 1995.

48\. Jenet Klyburn first appeared in _Superman_ Vol.1, No.304 (“The Parasite’s Prism of Peril”) October, 1976.

49\. Ta-er al-Sahfer isn’t the correct way to phonetically spell the Arabic word for “yellow bird,” so I fixed it, sorry not sorry.

50\. Rudyard Kipling, “The Female of the Species” (1911).

51\. _Superman: The Animated Series_ 1x02 (“The Last Son of Krypton, Part II”) 6 September 1996.

52\. _Arrow: Season 2.5_ Vol.1, No.4 (“Blood: Haunted”) March, 2015.

53\. Per Degaton first appeared in _All Star Comics_ Vol.1, No.35 (“The Day That Dropped Out of Time”) June, 1947.

54\. Time Stealers first appeared in _Justice League of America_ Vol.2, No.8 (“The Lightning Saga, Part 1 of 5: Lightning Lad”) June, 2007.

55\. Jay Z, “99 Problems” from _The Black Album_ (2003).

56\. _Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan_ (1982).

57\. Shakira, “Whenever, Wherever” from _Laundry Service_ (2001).

58\. Mary Austin, _Cactus Thorn_ (1927).

59\. _Jonah Hex_ Vol.2, No.6 (“Goin’ Back to Texas in a Box”) June, 2006.

60\. Jason Hex first appeared in _Jonah Hex_ Vol.1, No.51 (“The Comforter!”) August, 1981.

61\. Mei Ling first appeared in _Jonah Hex_ Vol.1, No.23 (“The Massacre of the Celestials!”) April, 1979.

62\. Kate Manser first appeared in _Weird Western Tales_ Vol.1, No.48 (“Slaveboat”) October, 1978.

63\. Hannibal Hawkes first appeared in _Western Comics_ Vol.1, No.5 (“The Duke of Orofino”) October, 1948.

64\. “Defying Gravity” from _Wicked_ (2003).

65\. Tall Bird first appeared in _DC Special Series_ Vol.1, No.16 (“The Last Bounty Hunter”) September, 1978.


	6. The Dissolution

**Time is like the painter’s lie, no line**  
**around apple or along thigh, though the apple**  
**aches to its sweet edge, strains**  
**to its skin, the seam of destiny. Invisible line**  
**closest to touch. Lines of wet grass**  
**on my arm, your tongue’s  
**wet line across my back.****

 **All the history in the bone-embedded hills**  
**of your body. Everything your mouth**  
**remembers. Your hands manipulate**  
**in the darkness, silver bromide  
**of desire darkening skin with light.****

Anne Michaels, “Last Night’s Moon”

* * *

Shock Value  
**Part 1**  
_A Book of Myths in Which Our Names Do Not Appear_  
**Act VI**  
The Dissolution

* * *

**Retcon** , _n_.

1\. A piece of new information that imposes a different interpretation on previously described events in a film, television series, or other fictional work, typically used to facilitate a dramatic plot shift or account for a canonical inconsistency.

2\. Narrative changes that occur to accommodate sequels or derivative works, allowing newer authors or creators to revise the diegetic history to include a course of events that would not have been possible in the original continuity.

3\. A retroactive continuity which postulates that history flows fundamentally from the future into the past, that the future is not basically a product of the past.

* * *

**Scene I**  
End of the Microcosm 

* * *

Maritza Blackbird was a character from the Wildstorm continuity in the comics, otherwise known as Earth-50.1 Here on Earth-1, she wasn’t a werewolf who’d been genetically enhanced with a symbiote that turned her skin to gold. Instead she’d become a temporal mercenary.

According to Rip, the Time Masters didn’t meddle with other worlds; and since the future where I was born didn’t exist in this reality anymore, my younger self was safe. Unfortunately that wasn’t true for anybody else on the team. Mick figured she’d go after his younger self first. That’s how we ended up back in Central City on the night his parents’ farmhouse had burned down: November twenty-seventh, 1985. Apparently he’d gone to see _Rocky IV_ —the movie he’d referenced when we were being tortured at кошмар—that afternoon.

Len had fallen in love for the first time after Mick saved his ass in juvie. Mick had fallen in love for the first time while his parents were being roasted alive. No wonder they were both the worst at feelings.

Anyhow.

I was sitting on the back end of the truck with my feet off the ground, dangling in the air. I might’ve looked out of place, but no one paid any attention to the crippled girl in the corner when there was a conflagration going on.

Len held a heavy axe he’d stolen over his shoulder and leaned against the fire engine next to me. “This isn’t my element,” he quipped.

“It’s mine,” Mick retorted as he hoisted a spiral of fire hosiery into his arms.

“Just keep a weather eye out for the Pilgrim,” said Rip, “Gideon calculated a ninety-seven percent chance that she would attack your younger self in this exact time and place.”

I didn’t bother pointing out that Gideon made inaccurate calculations like a boss. It wasn’t xyr fault. All those errors were human errors. Literally.

Sara and Jax had gone inside the flaming house to find the younger version of Mick, but he wasn’t there. I felt an anachronistic interface and pinged its location. “Ray,” I whispered over the radio, “I’m sending you coordinates for where I think the Pilgrim is.”

“Got it,” Ray said before he shrunk down and flew off into the field of wheat stalks.

Luckily they’d done their reaping before the fire, so none of the crops for that growing season had gone to waste. If he’d had enough beers to become a sad drunk, Mick would tell whoever was listening that the bright side of the fire—pun intended—was that he hadn’t ruined the harvest. Despite his attempts to uproot himself, Mick was a farmboy born and raised. Hell, he’d made me bread once; from wheat he’d grown, no less, but I digress.

Ray embiggened and blasted Maritza with his photon firearm, pun unintended. “Come with me if you want to live,” he told the younger version of Mick. I couldn’t help but smile when I heard the grin in his voice. “Always wanted to say that.”

* * *

Maritza arrived in Starling City on February twenty-seventh, 2007. Sara was just shy of twenty, and she’d gotten herself cuffed to a desk in the bullpen. Mick and Sara rescued her younger self and left her in the cargo bay with his younger self.

Never had I ever been more thrilled that I was a time remnant. I was horrible when I was a teenager. Nobody should’ve had to deal with that bitch. Not even twentysomething me.

I sighed and shuffled out of the room equidistant between the hatch and command central into the hallway. I was wordlessly talking to Gideon about a theory I had when Len touched my shoulder with one hand and tilted my face up with the other to kiss me, softly. Len meant it to be a quick kiss hello, but I hooked an arm around his neck and went on tiptoe to kiss him back thoroughly before my heels were reintroduced to the floor. I broke the kiss and nuzzled his nose with mine.

“Hi,” I whispered.

“Hi there,” Len whispered back.

I shook the worry that had taken root all through my shoulders off before I took my turn and gave him a sweet, lingering kiss. Then we went to get Lisa, who’d been cleaning the gold gun in the cargo bay. Gideon informed us the team xe was no longer able to track Maritza throughout space and time after the team had reassembled in command central.

“I’m sorry, sir,” xe said, “the timeline is showing no temporal distortions.”

Ray frowned, the space between his expressive dark eyebrows furrowing. “That doesn’t sound good,” he said.

“No, quite the opposite.” Rip sighed and leaned over the tabletop screen. “Without a way to track her whereabouts, she could target any of you at any point in time.”

“Gideon was tracking her temporal wake,” Martin said, “I didn’t think it was possible to conceal one’s movements through time.”

“Well,” Rip sighed, “it is if the Time Masters are on your side.”

I gnawed on the inside of my cheek. Savage didn’t move through time, but somehow he’d obscured his movements throughout history. It occurred to me that he shouldn’t have been able to conceal those movements from an organization whose sole purpose was curating and preserving the timeline…unless the Time Masters were on his side.

Why else would the Time Masters want to fight for a future in which ninety-five percent of the global population had been wiped out from the lethal combination of the Armageddon virus and nuclear war? Savage must’ve offered them some kind of incentive. Maybe an immunity to the virus? Maybe immortality? I knew nobody aged in the Vanishing Point, but I doubted they spent all of their time there. Savage could’ve offered them a century of immortality contained in one drop of blood from any past or future version of Carter or Kendra after he’d killed them, instead of a few months of immortality from the gene therapy they’d developed to keep themselves from aging on their missions.

It was one thing to travel through time in jumps and slivers like we’d been doing. It was another to live through the years organically. Time Masters, who lived detached lives so their sole purpose was to see what the future held, would be very interested in genuine immortality.

“How does this all work?” Ray wanted to know. “She can travel to any place, at any time? She could be killing us right now.”

“And if we die in the past…?” Martin had deduced the answer to his question, but he wanted to hear it spoken aloud.

“Then you die in the present,” Rip told him.

“That’s so interesting,” Ray intoned with a note of awe in his voice. “How long does it take for what happened in the past to affect the present?” he wondered, “could I be dead right now and not know it?” Then his lips gaped open in horror. “Maybe I am dead right now. Hello?” he said, “can anybody hear me?”

“No,” Len deadpanned.

“Nope,” Lisa grinned and popped the _p_ sound.

“Look,” Rip said huffily, “the important thing is not to panic.”

Jax raised his eyebrows at Rip from the other side of the table. “Someone’s playing Russian Roulette with our younger selves. Why would we panic?” he retorted sarcastically.

“Well, there are a few exceptions.” Rip flailed his hand at the demigoddess. “Kendra’s ability to reincarnate means it would do the Pilgrim no good to target her. Mrs. Snart is a time remnant, so her younger self has ceased to exist in our timeline,” he quit gesticulating in my general direction to look at the tabletop screen, “and as a former Time Master, to remove me from history would be quite dangerous to the timeline.”

Len snorted. “Well, that’s convenient.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Rip asked.

“Nothing.” Len splayed his fingers over the back of my neck and swept his calloused thumb over the knob of my topmost vertebra as he spoke, “just that it occurs to me you haven’t told us much about your past, Rip…” he cocked his head and I felt the tension radiating through him from where he was touching me, “…and I don’t trust a man with secrets.”

“Look,” Rip made an exasperated noise, “the less information you know about me, the less valuable you are to our numerous enemies.”

“Like I said,” Len retorted in his calmest, deadliest voice, “convenient.”

I reached up and took his other hand in both of mine, intertwining our fingers and kissing his knuckles. Len calmed down, but I knew he wasn’t going to let this go. I was okay with that because this was his way of protecting our family.

I, of course, had access to all of the information about Rip that I’d ever wanted to know. Gideon was loyal to xyr captain, but xe also had no way to stop me from using my powers to get what I wanted. I knew his name. I knew Booster had left him with his aunts a few weeks before his fifth birthday. I knew he’d lived the streets for months after the Hunters killed Michelle and Cyrilla, until the Time Master who would become his mentor brought him to a secret orphanage located in a fragmentation. I knew his training simulations, his mission logs, his career trajectory from the academy to his captaincy. I also knew that becoming a Time Master had been his legacy all along, but more on that later.

“Are they fighting?” Lisa asked, delighted.

“This is not a fight,” Rip told her, “it’s merely an exchange of ideas.”

“No,” Sara had moved to get a closer look at the screen on which the live camera feed in the cargo hold was playing, “not you. Them.”

That’s when the younger version of her slapped the teenage version of Mick across the face. Mick, the adult, laughed his ass off. Sara huffed and went to intervene before her younger self realized that slapping was a turnon for Mick.

Ray, meanwhile, thrashed and fell to the floor with a loud _thwack!_ Once we’d gotten him to the med bay, Gideon was able to determine that he was hemorrhaging internally. Maritza was attacking him on December nineteenth, 2014: seven months after he thought he’d lost his best friend, two months after he met Felicity. Apparently it was a variety of bruising and bleeding that resonated through space and time.

Jax and Martin—who’d merged into Firestorm—went along with Rip to stop the Pilgrim. I sat in the med bay with Ray, torn about whether or not touching him would help. I thought the foreknowledge about his future wife must’ve put out the torch he’d been carrying for me when we were stuck in 1958, but I didn’t want to hold his hand if that wasn’t true.

Lisa ended up doing it instead, looking immensely uncomfortable the whole time; but still, she never let go. That was progress.

* * *

I was sitting in one of the lower chairs that surrounded the table in command central after Ray stopped being retroactively injured by timeline shenanigans. Len stood beside me, his arms folded, tension threading through him. Lisa was leaning up against the wall in a doomed attempt to distance herself after getting so close to Ray when he was hurting. There was nothing romantic between them, but they’d become something like friends after ten months in 1958. It bothered her, seeing him in pain. I figured she’d refused to acknowledge that she cared for someone who wasn’t part of our family until now.

“What the Pilgrim did, the way she turned our attacks back on us…” Martin said after they were back on board the Waverider. “It’s as if she was reversing time.”

“It’s called temporal micromanipulation,” Rip explained, “the ability to control time in one’s immediate vicinity. We are lucky to have saved Dr. Palmer.”

“So basically,” Sara heaved a sigh and moved to stand by one corner of the table, “we have no idea who she’s going after next.”

“Well,” Len elongated the _l_ into one long syllable of snark, “we know it’s not Rip because he doesn’t have a past to go back to—”

That’s when he choked and spat out a wad of saliva and blood. It splattered on the floor, a spurt of dark red against the shiny silver metal. I flailed out of the chair when he made a soft noise in pain.

Lisa exhaled sharply in surprise and shouted a shrill, “Lenny!”

“Gideon,” I said as anxiety churned through my guts, “scan his timeline _now_.”

* * *

Maritza was attacking my husband on June tenth, 1988: the day he’d signed the dropout forms because he wouldn’t be coming back for his junior year of high school. Lewis had taken two-year-old Lisa to the pool a week earlier, and she’d almost drowned when he was teaching her to swim. Len promised himself that he would never leave her alone with him again. Yeah, in case you forgot that Lewis was literally the worst: he totally was. Good riddance.

Lisa arched her eyebrows at a banner on the ceiling. “‘Magic in the Night’ was their prom theme?” she said. “No wonder Lenny dropped out.”

I caught the tremor of worry in her tone. “Wasn’t yours ‘A Night of Stars’?” I asked. I’d seen the pictures from her prom, of Lisa and a boy named Sam Scudder who’d been her high school sweetheart.2 Not that she’d use the word sweetheart unless she was being rude. Terms of endearment weren’t necessarily endearing when a Snart was using them, but I digress.

Maritza was a chronokinetic metahuman, but with the ability to manipulate temporal mechanics only on a micro-level. I figured striking her with lightning wouldn’t do anything, so instead I short-circuited her brain and left her on the floor.

Len at sixteen was also on the floor, wheezing and bleeding from his face hitting the linoleum. I knelt and tilted his face up, checking for a broken jaw or chipped teeth. “Open your mouth,” I ordered.

“Why?” he asked, squirming like being touched was making his skin crawl. Which it might’ve been. Lewis had bought him a hooker on his fourteenth birthday and told him to become a man—between that and being abused, Len didn’t like being touched by people he didn’t know, and at this point in time he didn’t know me.

“I need to see if you’re hurt,” I told him gently, “I think you might’ve bitten your tongue.”

Len at sixteen made a disgruntled noise, but he unclenched his jaw and opened his mouth for me. If he looked at my breasts while I had my fingers in his mouth, well, in twenty-five years he’d be able to touch them all he wanted. I tried not to think about how weird it was that I was sixteen years older than him. I knew he was technically sixteen years older than me, but I was twenty-five when we met. It wasn’t inappropriate for someone in her midtwenties to date someone in their early forties, especially if that someone was an emotionally stunted criminal. It would be inappropriate for him to be attracted to me when I was twice his age.

I wasn’t attracted to him. Len at sixteen was skinny in a gangly sort of way, like he’d had a growth spurt his body hadn’t adapted to yet, and he had _hair_. Not short hair, but a black mess he’d put in a manbun. I wondered, idly, if the mess was because he’d tried to brush it without the right kind of comb. I thought he was cute in the same way a puppy or a kitten or a bunny was cute. There were hints of the beautiful man I knew he’d become in his face, but he didn’t move me. I wanted to give him a hug, to tell him that someday he’d be happy and safe and loved, but that was it.

“What are you,” he asked once I was satisfied he hadn’t bitten through his tongue or broken any of his teeth, “the new school nurse, or something?”

I snorted. “I’m a librarian,” I retorted.

Lisa had found her younger self hiding in the office, and grabbed her two-year-old self while the secretary was calling the police. No paradox unfolded in the hallway at the high school. It hadn’t happened when Martin had met his younger self in 1975, either. Maybe that was a cautionary tale the Time Masters told new recruits to keep them from changing the past.

Anyhow.

I left sixteen-year-old Len and two-year-old Lisa in the cargo bay with the teenage versions of Mick and Sara, and went to find my husband. I propped my cane against the wall by the door and shuffled over to where he sat on the edge of my mattress.

Len smoothed his hands over my back and shoulders like he was touching something precious. “It’s you,” he whispered fervently. “It’s always been you. I remember meeting you that day,” he stroked my hair. “I remember _this_ , but when we met again it had been twenty-five years. Your hair was brown, and longer. You had different glasses and a different cane. I spent those years convincing myself you weren’t real and so I didn’t recognize you,” he exhaled a sharp heavy sound, “but I’ve been thinking about you since I was sixteen. It’s always been you, Mac.”

That’s when I kissed him. Who could even blame me, after that winning speech? Okay, it was a little bit weird that I’d been in his spank bank since he was underage, but I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about the closed loop I’d created that had begun and ended here. I’d loved him for two years before I know he was real, but he’d thought about me for a quarter of a century before we met again. All those years of reading comic books and watching TV, of being alone in my bedroom with my stories and escaping to other worlds—it was all for me, because that was what I loved, but it had brought me here to him…

…it had brought me home.

Len broke the kiss and exhaled a raw, hoarse sound. “I waited twenty-five years to touch you like this,” he told me softly. “Didn’t know what it was I was waiting for, but it was always you.”

I was gasping from how intense the kiss was, so I was breathless when I said: “So you punked out after I told you that I loved you for the first time because…?”

Instead of answering my question—and it might as well have been rhetorical because I had known the answer all along—he took his turn and kissed me again, so deeply that my toes curled and I tingled all over. At some point I ended up sitting on his lap. Len was happy to have me there, if the half-hard erection in his jeans was any indication, but he wasn’t kissing me with the intention of doing something about it. These kisses weren’t foreplay. Instead he was kissing me because he wanted to, and because he could. No other reason was necessary.

Len cupped my face and kissed my forehead, his thumbs caressing my cheekbones so slowly and so softly that I felt how much he loved me within the sweep of that simple touch. I nuzzled the heels of his palms and kissed the inside of his left wrist, unobscured by his watch. Len smiled wide and incongruously warm after I kissed the corner of his mouth.

“Love you,” I told him, and I meant it with all my heart.

“Love you too,” he said, and I knew he felt the same way.

* * *

Maritza couldn’t go after any of the people she’d made failed attempts on. Which meant that Rip, Kendra, Ray, Sara, Mick, Lisa, Len and I would be safe. Martin and Jax were the only members of our team still in danger and so Rip planned to kidnap them as infants to ensure their safety. Mick and Rip went to kidnap Martin on March sixteenth, 1950. Martin and Ray went to kidnap Jax on September twelfth, 1996.3 That was how Jax met his father for the first time. I didn’t eavesdrop on their moment. I was a nosy meddler, but I wasn’t a monster.

“We’re here,” Rip informed us after the ship landed and he practically threw himself out of his seat in his haste.

“…where is here?” Len wanted to know.

“Come,” Rip said as the hatch opened, “I’ll show you.”

That’s when we stepped out into the English countryside and followed a stone path to a brick and mortar house. It smelled like asphalt after rainfall, magnolias, and mince pies baking in the kitchen. That ruined it for me, because the smell of meat cooking always made me want to throw up. Ugh.

“Again,” Len kept one hand at the small of my back and tapped the fingers of the other against his thigh despite the absence of his holster, “where is here?”

“We need a safe harbor for your younger selves,” Rip explained as the door opened and Mrs. Maylie emerged.

“I’ve been waiting,” she told him with a smile. “It’s good to see you.”

“It is good to see you too,” Rip took her hand in both of his before he called her, “mother.”

Here’s the thing: Rip’s master plan was to leave the infants, two-year-old Lisa, sixteen-year-old Len, seventeen-year-old Mick, and nineteen-year-old Sara in the Midlands of London circa 1968 with Mrs. Maylie, the woman who’d raised him after the Hunters killed his aunts.4 Apparently he hadn’t mentioned her before when I asked him about his parentage because she wasn’t his biological mother.

I exhaled with enough force to flap my lips and made a rude noise at his semantic distinction. Rip, as usual, ignored me.

That’s when Mrs. Maylie served us tea. I would’ve been disappointed by the lack of crumpets, but there were scones with chocolate chips in them. I didn’t like tea, so I drank milk out of a teacup and munched on scones. Len folded himself onto an elaborate windowsill. I doubted it was designed for sitting, but I moved a vase out of my way and sat next to him anyway. Len kept one hand on me, his thumb idly stroking the curves where my waist met my hip as he sipped his own tea.

I watched a boy wearing a brown leather jacket—the same one that Rip wore whenever he wasn’t wearing the jacket he’d gotten from Jonah Hex—get smacked after he tried to steal a mince pie. I thought it was a younger version of Rip, and I was right, but more on that later.

“So,” Jax slumped in his seat and glanced around the room, “this is where Rip plans on keeping our baby selves.”

“If all goes according to plan,” Martin said, “we’ll only be here for a few minutes. Then, presumably, never remember.”

I scoffed. I didn’t like this plan. I kept telling myself that I’d created a causality loop, so the sixteen-year-old version of Len would return to the future and spend the next twenty-five years convincing himself that I wasn’t real. Only the timeline was in flux, so anything was possible. Including a version of Len that never returned to 1988, a Leonard Snart who’d never meet me. What a weird thought.

“When’s the last time anything went according to plan?” Ray wondered.

“There wasn’t a last time,” Lisa informed him sweetly before she stole one of my scones.

“Listen, I’d sit up if I were you,” Rip told Jax, “she’ll kill you if she catches you slouching. Don’t be fooled by appearances. That woman is as tough as nails.”

“Funny that you never mentioned having a mother,” Len said flatly.

“Adopted mother,” Mrs. Maylie clarified and went to pour some more tea. “So,” she said as she refilled the professor’s teacup, “Michael—”

“Michael?” Kendra blurted, incredulous.

“That’s me,” Rip informed us, “my birth name.”

It was actually his middle name, but he’d hated the name Ripley as a child and so he’d gone by Michael.

Anyhow.

“Time Masters insist on the adoption of new identities for their own protection,” Mrs. Maylie explained.

“How do you know so much about the Time Masters?” Jax wanted to know.

“I work for them,” Mrs. Maylie said nonchalantly. “Oh, don’t worry,” she added as tension spread through the negative space like butter on a warm biscuit, “my true loyalty is to my children.” Then, she refilled Rip’s teacup as though nothing could go wrong.

“Thank you,” Rip took a quiet sip of tea before he explained, “the Time Masters fill their ranks with children, orphans pulled from throughout the course of history.”

“Indeed,” Mrs. Maylie pressed her lips together in a futile attempt to contain a smile, “when Michael arrived at the refuge, he had nothing but the clothes on his back. There’s a reason it’s called the refuge, and a reason that it exists at a secret location in history,” she smiled wider, “the Time Masters won’t think to look for you here.”

* * *

Len was shockingly good with babies, pun unintended. It shouldn’t have been a shock, because he’d practically raised Lisa, but watching him hold the infant Jax made me all gooey in places. I hadn’t expected that. It didn’t mean I wanted a baby, though. Not anytime soon.

“Want to hold him?” Len asked.

I shook my head so fast my glasses almost slipped off my nose. I adjusted them and took a long step back. “Nope,” I popped the _p_ sound. “I’m not a baby person, and I have to pee, so.”

That’s when I shuffled out of the house and back aboard the Waverider. I could’ve used one of the toilets—or lavatories, since we were in London—inside the house, but I didn’t want to hold a baby. I really wasn’t a baby person. Hell, all they did was eat, poop, and spit up, and they had necks that couldn’t support their own heads. I was scared I might hurt Jax or Martin retroactively. This paradoxical situation had way too many variables, too many things that could go horribly wrong.

I did my business, washed my hands, and I was eating a finger sandwich I’d stolen from a plate of checkerboard plain white bread with cheese filling and whole grain bread with cucumber slices when Len found me. I’d wrapped sandwiches, scones, and shortbread in paper doilies and hidden them in my ginormous purse. I hoarded food, especially when it was free. Don’t judge me.

Len toed off his shoes and sat on the bed, scooting until his thigh was pressed up against mine. I smiled at the solid feeling of his body close enough to touch more—if I wanted—and offered him a sandwich. Len smiled back, one corner of his mouth unfurling softly. It took my husband all of two bites to finish the finger sandwich. Then he glanced at me over his shoulder, the flick of his gaze to me before he looked away showing me that he was feeling unsure.

“Did we have kids in the future where everybody dies?” Len asked in the most vulnerable tone I’d ever heard come out of his mouth.

I nodded and nuzzled his shoulder through his jacket and shirt before I answered his question with my words. “Yeah,” I exhaled the word in a quiet gust of air, “we had Rose, and Sela, and three biological children: Malcolm, Zenobia, and Leonora.”

“Malcolm,” Len murmured, “because you refused to answer to any other name for a year, so your parents called you Malcolm until you decided you liked the name Mackenzie after all.”

I nodded again. “Zenobia means ‘the life of Zeus’ in Ancient Greek,” I told him, “it was the name of a Syrian queen who ruled the Palmyrene Empire in the third century BCE.”

Len took one of my hands in both of his, idly playing with my fingers to have something to do with his hands. “Leonora,” he said in that vulnerable tone, hushed and hesitant like he couldn’t believe his ears. 

“Yeah.” I swirled my thumb over the third knuckle of his index finger and squeezed his hand. “Leonora, after you.”

That’s when he let go of my hand and tangled his fingers in my hair to kiss me hard, claiming, consuming. I didn’t even care that he tasted like cheese sandwiches and sugary black tea. That’s how good it was. Len skimmed his tongue over my bottom lip before he caught it between his teeth and then bit down, nibbling and sucking hard enough to make me moan. I dug my fingertips into the nape of his neck and whimpered when he kissed my chin. Len made a low, smug noise in the back of his throat and moved his mouth to my neck.

I moaned again as pleasure fizzed through me sweet and sharp, frothing and condensating. Len wrapped an arm around my waist, scooping me onto his lap and squeezing the flesh of my hip hard enough to bruise. I knew he felt guilty for leaving marks on me in the shape of his fingers after sex, but I bruised like a peach and pain didn’t bother me. Hell, I’d left a permanent mark on his shoulder; and, truth be told, on his heart.

Leonard Snart was _mine_. If our marriage ever ended, I’d still be part of him…but I wouldn’t settle for parts. I wanted the whole package.

“Len…” I cradled the back of his head and moaned again when he scraped his teeth over the pulse thundering in my throat, “I—”

Unfortunately, a disembodied British voice interrupted us when Rip said: “everyone, please report to the main deck immediately.”

Len made a disgruntled noise and took his hands off me. I kissed him again, softly, and got off his lap. “I miss our home too,” he told me as we walked to command central, “I don’t get cockblocked there.”

I snorted. “It’s not just our home anymore,” I pointed out, “Rose and Sela are there too. It’s not like we can have sex wherever we want, not with two nine-year-old girls in the house.”

“That’s true.” Len cocked his head in concession. “Okay, compromise: we pay Louise and Jesse to take ’em to an amusement park after the brand new house is built and we fuck in every room before they get back.”

“Well,” I stretched the _l_ sound out into a lowkey innuendo, “I’d rather ride you than a roller coaster.”

Len smirked. Once he’d tried to get me to go to an amusement park. I’d ended up sitting on a bench reading a book and eating curly fries while he, Lisa and Mick rode the roller coasters. Mick quit after one round with the Zipper, threw up, and then sat with me until the Snart siblings had their fun. Len kissed me later on the carousel, his mouth dizzyingly sweet with the taste of blue cotton candy. I’d always liked pink cotton candy better than any other kind, but he’d changed my mind. That’s love, I guess.

Anyhow.

“What’s going on?” Sara asked once the team had reassembled around the table.

“Gideon has intercepted a transchronal beacon,” Rip informed her. “Gideon, show us.”

That’s when Maritza appeared on the tabletop screen, and a larger one adhered to the wall. “This message is for Rip Hunter,” she said. “I’m going to make this very quick, and very simple…”

Then a series of images flashed across the screen, accompanied by names: Louise Lincoln, Beatriz da Costa, Joan Williams, Quentin Lance, Clarissa Stein, Anna Choi.

“Who’s the redhead?” Mick wondered.

Here’s the thing: Joan Williams was married to Jay Garrick in the comics pre-reboot, and in most continuities she only existed on Earth-2. There was no Jay on Earth-1 in the Arrowverse, but more on that later. I knew the Earth-1 version of Joan as Muffintop, a metahuman with explosive powers who owned a little bakery called the _Blue Canary Cake Emporium_ in Keystone City. 5 Apparently she and her father were both fans of They Might Be Giants, but that was neither here nor there. Joan was a hopeless romantic, an avid reader of the same trashy paranormal romance novels I loved, and in the potential future I’d visited she’d had a daughter. Mick’s daughter.

“Um,” I elongated the _mmm_ sound into awkwardness, “your future wife.”

Mick turned and I saw that his mouth was gaping open in shock. “What,” he blurted.

“If I can’t find you,” Maritza said in a sharp threatening voice, “I can find those you love—” the video feed cut back to her and we saw that she was holding Mr. Jackson hostage, “—your family, friends, everyone you care about will all suffer and die because of you, unless you surrender your younger selves to me.”

“So she can erase you all from history,” Rip said.

“If it’s of any comfort,” Maritza kept one hand on the back of Mr. Jackson’s neck and used the other to point a gun at his head, “you won’t feel a thing. As for your loved ones, I cannot promise the same thing.”

Then her transmission ended. I was _fuming_ , veins of electricity creeping between my knuckles to statically taste the stale air.

Here’s the thing: Bea had wanted to go on the mission with us when I first told her about it. I’d gone without her because one of the showrunners on Earth-33 said it was a suicide mission. Bea only capitulated after she realized the metahumans of Central City—the ones who weren’t criminals, the ones who just wanted to get on with their lives after the particle accelerator exploded, the ones who called me a goddess—needed someone like her around in case I never returned. Barry didn’t care about them, didn’t even know most of them. Not like we did. Those metahumans were _our_ people.

All at once I felt gutwrenchingly, heartstoppingly homesick. I was still totally pissed off, but I wanted this over with. I was done with time travel, and causality loops, and living in a liminal spaceship. I missed my memory foam mattress, my vaguely B-movie villainous swivel chair at S. T. A. R. Labs, my office at the Naydel Library, and everyone I loved who wasn’t part of the team.

I wanted the Pilgrim dead, but more than that, I wanted to go _home_.

“Gideon,” said Rip, “I take it that transmission included a carrier frequency through which the Pilgrim can be contacted?”

“Yes, Captain,” xe informed him.

Rip huffed in a futile attempt to shove the anger out along with the oxygen he’d inhaled. “Hail her,” he grit his teeth around the word _her_ before he said, “please.”

“What are you planning to do?” Martin asked, grimly, folding his arms as the transmission reached Maritza.

“Captain Hunter,” she said after she appeared on every screen in command central.

Rip pressed his palms flat against the corners of the tabletop and leaned over her hologram below. “I’m going to make this easy—”

“I already have,” Maritza interrupted, “the lives of your team’s nearest and dearest for their younger selves.”

“—and I’m going to counter that demand with an offer of my own,” Rip told her, “I will surrender myself if you spare the lives of my crew and their loved ones.”

“…a noble gesture, but worthless,” Maritza retorted, “my directive is to eliminate your entire team, not just you.”

Rip nodded. “Yes, well…I’m not talking about me _now_. I’m offering you me, in the past. Rip Hunter before he became a Time Master,” he leaned further over the tabletop screen and tapped the fingers of his left hand on the flat surface, “eliminate him, and this team will never have been.”

Maritza glared at him. “If this is some kind of trick—”

“It’s no _trick_ ,” Rip enunciated that consonant so hard it was almost palpable, “enough people have died at my expense. Gideon will send you the location,” he said and stepped away from the table with slow finality as the transmission ended. Then he turned to Len. “Mr. Snart, your wish is about to come true: you’re going to meet my younger self.”

* * *

Here’s the thing: the Time Masters had constructed earthly headquarters and training posts and whatnot in the beginning of their organization, when they were still mapping out spacetime. Most of those early third dimensional outposts were rendered defunct after they figured out a way to construct dwellings and other facilities at the Vanishing Point in the fourth dimension—where people didn’t age or perceive time linearly—but more on that later.

Rip went inside the otherwise empty outpost with the whole team as backup, except for Lisa and me. Instead, we went to find her spaceship and rescue our loved ones.

“Where’s my dad?” I heard Jax asking over the radio.

“On board my ship along with the rest,” Maritza answered. “All in perfect condition, as long as your captain honors his end of our bargain.”

“Are we sure she actually has anyone besides the kid’s dad?” Lisa wondered without bothering to whisper.

“No,” I shook my head, “but if she does, then rescuing them removes any leverage she can use against us.”

“I got that,” Lisa retorted, “but if this bitch is powerful enough to capture three metahumans and a demigoddess, what makes you think we can rescue them?”

I shrugged. “I’m awesome,” I told her, “that’s what.”

Lisa rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. I smiled back and booped Georgiana, the artificial intelligence construct Maritza used as her crew.

“Let’s get down to business,” Rip said. I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep myself from saying, _to defeat the Huns!_

I told the hatch to open and we boarded her ship, the Blackbird. Louise, Bea, and Joan were chained to chairs in the Pilgrim’s command central with power dampers that functioned as handcuffs. Quentin was chained with a pair of handcuffs I’m guessing were his, while Clarissa was cuffed with the same variety of handcuffs Mick had used on Len before he froze his hand off. I checked the surveillance feed and found Anna unconscious in the brig, her legs shifted into a snakelike tail. I remembered that Nüwa, her mother, was sometimes depicted as being half-woman, half-snake. Apparently that was more fact than myth.

Also: I must’ve leveled up between saving Rose and Sela and this rescue mission, because I disempowered the power dampers with a thought. Louise came at Lisa and me like a flurry of snow, her arms thrown awkwardly around our necks.

Bea grinned wide and warm, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “About time,” she quipped.

“Not that I mind the rescue,” Quentin stood and rubbed where the cuffs had chafed his wrists, “but what the hell is she?”

“What’s the matter,” Lisa smiled poisonously at him because he was talking about me like I wasn’t in the room, “you’ve never seen a metahuman before?”

I squawked at the word _metahuman_. This was Quentin Lance from 2007, not 2015; he didn’t know about masked vigilantes or metahumans yet. Hell, he didn’t even know that—at the plot point he was from—both of his daughters were in love with Oliver Queen.

“What’s going on?” Joan wanted to know.

That’s when I remembered we’d never met in person. I sighed and exhaled with enough force to flap my lips. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Mackenzie Snart, but I think you know me better as Electric Boogaloo.”

Electric Boogaloo was my username in the online metahuman community I’d created before I became Lady Zeus. I wanted to go by Medusa—since my mother had called me that for years because of the snake hair—but using a name associated with my abilities made a lot more sense than inside jokes from a parallel universe.

“Where have you _been_?” Joan asked, her hushed tone heavy with incredulity.

“It’s a long story,” I told her with another sigh, “one that I promise to tell you someday, but right now we’re getting Anna and then getting the hell out of here.”

Lisa and I stormed the outpost after we’d gotten everyone aboard the Waverider, only to find Maritza in a pile of frozen irradiated ash on the otherwise eerily white futuristic linoleum floor. I arched my eyebrows at the younger version of Rip, whose knuckles were clutching white on the hilt of a bloody knife. I figured he’d stabbed Maritza to frazzle her into losing control of her powers. That’s how they’d killed her.

“I was a cutpurse from the age of five,” Rip explained, “starved more than I ate. I knew what I’d do, if she tried to harm me.”

“Lucky for us you didn’t forget your roots,” Len deadpanned.

“Believe me, Mr. Snart,” Rip heaved a sigh in a futile attempt to unburden himself, “I’ve tried.”

Then he turned and walked out, his brown coat unfurling dramatically behind him. I rolled my eyes and shuffled over to Len after he’d holstered the cold gun and his goggles were tugged down around his neck. I reached out for him, offering my hand. Len took it and intertwined our fingers. That’s how we returned to the ship: wordlessly, holding hands in the aftermath of another hollow victory.

Mick was curious about Joan, but he stayed with Bea until we jumped back to the English countryside to drop off Mrs. Maylie and ten-year-old Rip. Anna had woken up and shapeshifted her tail back into a pair of legs, but she was unfazed. Hell, she’d literally gone to the _dìyù_ and back. Not much fazed her anymore.

Louise refused to tell me what had been going on since we left, which made me worry that something had gone horribly wrong in the present. I was screaming internally when I went to talk to Joan. I told her about the potential future, about what she could have—or could’ve had, because I was hoping by the time the mission was over the potential future I’d visited would be past tense—with Mick before I offered her an amnesia pill to erase her short-term memory.

“If he wants that future,” Joan smiled so shyly and so sweetly I got a toothache just looking at her, “then you tell him where to find me. I don’t want to know about the possibilities when I meet him. It’s just me and my dad, he has Alzheimer’s, and I run my own business when I’m not taking care of him. I don’t need any more _pressure_ …”

“If it happens,” I said, “you want it to be organic. Not some destiny bullshit.”

Joan nodded. “I don’t want him to think he has to ask me out because of your foreknowledge,” she clarified, “when I say no pressure, I mean it.”

I gave her a paper cup of water and told her to wait and take the pill after we landed in 2016. Nobody gave pills to Anna, Bea, or Louise, because they’d known all about the mission before Maritza came after them. I fell asleep in the seat across from the captain’s chair and napped until I heard Rip yawping.

“Time—the future from which your younger selves were removed—is beginning to set,” he explained, “as evidenced by the change in Clarissa’s memory.”

Clarissa hadn’t known who Martin was when she saw him. Which was terribad, but at least she didn’t remember that he hadn’t said goodbye to her before he left.

“Okay,” Jax said, “so how long d’we have ’til these changes stick?”

“No one knows,” Mick muttered.

“Which is why we need to move swiftly to locate Vandal Savage,” Rip said, “if any of your lives are to be restored to normal.”

“There’s one place and time where and when we know he’ll be,” I pointed out.

Lisa folded her arms and uncrossed her knees so her heels touched the floor. “2166,” she enunciated the _x_ sound harshly, “after he’s conquered the world.”

Martin narrowed his eyes at Rip from the other end of the table. “Isn’t it too dangerous to strike at Savage while he’s at the height of his powers?” he asked.

“That it is,” Rip answered, “but we are quite literally running out of time.”

* * *

**Scene II**  
End of the Macrocosm 

* * *

Savage had taken over the world with a twofold plan. First, he manipulated Per Degaton into unleashing the Armageddon virus. Then, after it had killed eleven billion people, he decimated what remained of the global population by dropping nuclear bombs on major cities. There were six hundred million people left on the planet in 2152. That number had dwindled until only a few million remained. Savage had hundreds of thousands of troops all over the world, and he’d consolidated his power into a worldwide empire, but London had kept him out for almost a decade. That had changed in 2166. With the Second Blitz we knew was coming, he would succeed in conquering this earth.

What happened when we emerged from hypertime was a bombardment, aerial strikes aimed at our spaceship. London had all but fallen and now its skies were flown by Neo-Nazis loyal to Savage. Whoops.

“We’re going to need to find a safe place to set down, Gideon!” Rip shouted as I generated a magnetic field to shield the Waverider from the gunfire.

“I don’t believe there are any safe places, Captain,” xe informed him.

“Are we over London yet?” Martin asked, his voice wobbling in distress.

Rip nodded even though he was facing the windshield and Martin couldn’t see him. “What’s left of it,” he answered.

“Why is London shooting at us?” Jax yelled.

“Savage’s forces are doing the shooting,” Rip told him. “Here in 2166, they’ve subjugated most of the globe.”

I winced every time a projectile hit my field. I kept anything from damaging the Waverider, but still the impact made the ship groan and shudder. Ugh.

“Captain,” said Gideon, “I’ve managed to slip beneath their artillery fire.”

“Set us down on the outskirts of the city, Gideon,” Rip told xyr as the ship landed and he unfolded himself from the captain’s chair, “near the encampment of the remaining Resistance forces. We are going to need to proceed swiftly.”

“I realize your family is in jeopardy,” said Martin in a hurried voice that matched how frenzied the captain was acting, “but perhaps some deliberation—”

Rip whirled on him to yawp, “We really don’t have the time, Martin! According to Gideon,” he flailed one hand at the tabletop screen to show us the timeline data, “Savage is going to be out in the open _tonight_. Vulnerable. Now, in order to capture him, I require the services of—”

“Killer, Goldilocks, Klepto, and Pyro,” Mick interjected gleefully.

Lisa glared at Mick, who’d been calling her Goldilocks since forever. Apparently she had blonde hair as a baby. It had grown darker as she got older, but I digress.

“Bingo,” said Rip.

That’s how they all ended up watching Savage give a pep talk to his army of Neo-Nazis. Hell, he actually _was_ Hitler in the comics. I guess declaring World War III wasn’t a shock, pun unintended. I was surprised it had taken us a century and a half to have World War III, though. World War I and World War II were fought within thirty years of each other, after all.

There was a blonde woman behind the podium with Savage, looking like the poster child for Aryan ideals. Kendra noticed something else about her when she left the stage with Savage.

“Gideon,” she leaned over the tabletop and narrowed her eyes at the screen, “push in on the woman.” Gideon paused the video feed and focused on the blonde. “That bracelet she’s wearing…” Kendra looked at me from across the table and I saw she had a theory, “can you get a clearer image?”

Gideon zoomed in on her wrist and I realized what Kendra had seen with her sharp hawk eyes. “That’s your bracelet,” I deduced, “Khufu gave it to you when you were Chay-Ara.”

Kendra nodded and whispered, “Omigod.”

I didn’t think she meant to say that out loud. “Kendra,” I said, “we have the dagger, and it’s not like you could kill him with a bracelet—”

“I _know_ ,” Kendra said in such a vulnerable tone of voice that I was overwhelmed by the impulse to give her a hug, “but it’s _my_ bracelet, Mac.”

That’s when I realized four thousand years of history, of loving her soulmate, were symbolized by the bracelet. While there was a kind of symmetry in killing somebody with the weapon they’d used to kill you, there was also a kind of poetic justice in killing somebody with a symbol of the love you’d died for over and over. Hell, the bracelet didn’t belong to Savage because it was _hers_. That was enough of a reason to steal it back.

“If we don’t move real soon,” I heard Mick say to Len over the radio, “we’re gonna get ourselves killed.”

“How about we play this like Chicago?” Len asked.

“Could work,” Lisa said in a saccharine voice before she swept Rip’s feet out from under him to send him sprawling in front of the Neo-Nazis guarding Savage.

“What the hell did you do that for?” Sara asked in a harsh whisper as they all ducked to hide behind a bunch of stone pillars.

“We’ll take Savage,” Len said to Lisa and Sara, “you tie up the guards.”

Savage was going up the stairs while the blonde stayed behind with assorted Neo-Nazis. Sara had brought a metal bō staff to a laser gun fight, but she could hold her own without a weapon of any kind. I disabled their weapons anyway. Maybe that wasn’t playing fair, but Snarts played to win.

“Sara,” Kendra said, “the woman you’re fighting, you need to take her bracelet.”

“Are you seriously jewelry shopping right now?” Sara huffed.

Unfortunately even without their blasters, the team was outnumbered and Savage had escaped while his guards distracted them. Rip ordered the team to fall back, and I didn’t miss the way the blonde was looking at my husband when he held her at gunpoint before he retreated. I rolled my eyes to look at the ceiling in a nonverbal, _Really?_ because now was so not the time for jealousy. Jax extracted the team and they flew back to the Waverider in the jump ship without the bracelet or Savage. Things had, predictably, not gone according to plan.

“What, exactly, did you think you were doing back there?” Rip shouted once they were all back on the ship.

“We were distracting Savage’s pals,” Lisa said as her heels clicked metallically against the floor.

“Which worked, by the way,” Len added smugly.

“Yes,” said Rip. “Well, I could’ve been killed.”

“Never said it worked perfectly,” Mick deadpanned.

“At least it wasn’t a complete bust. We found out about Kendra’s bracelet,” Sara pointed out.

Rip ground to a halt. “What bracelet?” he asked.

“Kendra’s bracelet,” I told him once we were all assembled in the captain’s quarters, “from the night she died as Chay-Ara.”

“That’s great!” Ray blurted, then realized what had come out of his mouth. “Not the death part,” he clarified. “That’s terrible—”

“Objects from the night of your death can be used to kill Savage,” Sara interjected.

Kendra gave her a sweet, surprised smile.

“I’m your girlfriend,” Sara pointed out, “I listen to you.”

Lisa snorted. “How sweet,” she said in a voice that oozed sarcasm.

Len sat on the armrest of the chair I was occupying and crossed his legs. I took one of his hands to hold and he wrapped his other arm loosely around my shoulders, his thumb idly sweeping over the curvature of my clavicle. “There’s just one small problem,” he said in his smoothest voice. “We have the dagger Mac stole from Savage in 1986. Why do we need the bracelet?”

“It’s not like we can have too many MacGuffins,” I said, “contingency plans are my jam.”

“It’s a bracelet,” Mick retorted, “how are you supposed to kill Savage with it?”

“That’s a question we will answer the moment we have obtained it,” Rip told him.

“Captain,” said Gideon in xyr disembodied voice, “I’ve detected movement three hundred meters southwest of our position and closing.”

“Savage’s army?” Ray asked.

“Negative,” xe informed him. “I believe they are all that remain of the Resistance forces.”

Rip inhaled sharply. “I’m going to make contact with them,” he said, “they might have information on Savage that we can use to our advantage. In the meantime, Ms. Lance, get Ms. Saunders ready. Dr. Palmer?”

Ray nodded and they left the captain’s quarters to fetch the professor and Jax.

“Okay,” Sara called after them, “how am I supposed to teach someone to fight with a piece of jewelry?”

“Good question,” Rip said.

Sara heaved a sigh and leaned back against the wooden table festooned with navigational miscellany. “It wasn’t rhetorical,” she muttered petulantly.

That’s when something occurred to me. “It’s doesn’t have to be a bracelet,” I blurted.

Mick flicked his gaze to me and kept it there. “What’re you talking about?” he asked.

“It’s metal,” I said.

Len knew me well enough to know where my train of thought was going. “It doesn’t have to be a piece of jewelry,” he murmured.

“Oh!” Kendra exhaled the word in a hush and her eyes went wide as she realized what I meant.

“It could be forged into a weapon.” Sara turned and cocked her head, birdlike, at the image of the bracelet on the wall screen. “Not by itself, but we could melt it down…”

I nodded. “I don’t know whether combining it with the dagger would negate the magic somehow,” I told her. “I have no idea how magic actually works, but didn’t Aldus collect antiques that might’ve belonged to you in past lives? Maybe he had something we could use.”

Sara and Kendra went to look through Aldus’s collection of antiquities, which we’d acquired in 1975 after Carter and Aldus were killed. Rip, Ray, Jax, and Martin had gone to a rebel encampment and learned that Savage had gone underground at his citadel after our failed attempt to abduct him. Ray wanted to take soil samples from another encampment they’d found to figure out what kind of weaponry Savage had used to destroy it.

“Do we have a plan for stealing this bracelet?” Rip asked once he and Ray had returned to command central.

“Yeah,” Mick retorted, “we’re on it.”

Ray side-eyed us. “Please don’t tell me the plan is to just walk into the citadel and steal the bracelet off of her wrist,” he said.

“Okay,” Len smirked at him as I used my cane to get back on my feet, “I won’t tell you that.”

* * *

I overheard Sara and Kendra talking about Carter while they looked through the trunks in the cargo hold and muted the radio frequency after Kendra told her: “Carter was my past, but you’re my future.”

I used my powers to get us into the citadel. It was easy, almost too easy. I found the blonde training with three soldiers in a brightly lit training area on the ground floor. There were windows everywhere. It was arrogant to have so much glass around in a stronghold, but Savage could afford his arrogance in the literal and figural sense of the phrase. After all, he was immortal and so were his acolytes. Rip blew him up and he was still fucking shit up a hundred and eighty years in the future. I figured Savage thought could take the cockroach approach to surviving again if anyone tried to bomb the citadel.

Anyhow, the blond was fighting three men at once…only they were attacking her one by one for some unfathomable reason. I arched my eyebrows and wondered why they didn’t all come at her simultaneously. Hell, she wore a cape. If they stepped on her cape and/or rushed her as a team, overpowering her would be easy as pie. Not that making pies was _easy_ , especially when the crust was homemade, but I digress.

“Savage has warned you all about the radicals who oppose us,” said the blonde as she held a knife to the throat of one soldier, “they will not show you the mercy I just did.”

I snorted as she dismissed them and watched Mick sneaking up behind her. Then, he cleared his throat.

“I said you’re dismissed,” the blonde told him harshly before she turned and threw a knife at him.

I stopped the blade in midair and sent it flying back at her. Len took the opportunity to aim his gun at her head. “Oh,” he snarked back. “We thought you said ‘missed.’”

“Whoever you are,” said the blonde, “you’re certainly persistent.”

Lisa smirked. I wondered when she’d had time to touch up her lipstick. Impressive. “Not really,” she said.

“We just like bright sparkly objects,” Mick glanced down at her wrist, “like that bracelet.”

“So you’d risk dying for a bauble,” the blonde said.

Mick nodded, his body language wordlessly communicating menace. “It works with my outfit,” he told her.

That’s when the alarm went off. I made a garbage disposal noise.

“What now, Mr. Snart?” the blonde wondered smugly.

“How do you know my name?” Len asked in his calmest, deadliest voice.

I shut the alarm off with my brain and suggested that we leave before they realized it wasn’t a drill, or something equally innocuous. Lisa hit the blonde with her gun and knocked her out cold. Mick carried her onto the jump ship and into the brig once we’d returned to the Waverider. It didn’t take much time for this particular hostage to regain consciousness.

Rip found our snit in the brig and made a disgruntled noise when he noticed we’d taken a hostage. “There I was thinking we could go a whole week without kidnapping anyone,” he said huffily.

I rolled my eyes, but I figured he thought kidnapping members of the team as teenagers or infants for their own good didn’t count.

“I think you’ll find it would’ve been better to simply kill me,” said the blonde.

“I agree,” Mick muttered.

Len offered the bracelet he’d stolen from her to Rip. “It’s a little more complicated than _that_ ,” he bit down around the word to enunciate the consonant, “she knew who I was.”

“I know who all of you are,” the blonde told him before she shifted her focus to Rip. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, غريب.”

Rip exhaled a rueful laugh. “I see Savage has been rather chatty with his lieutenants,” he said.

“If you think I am merely his soldier, you’re more idiotic than I claim. I’m not his lieutenant,” the blonde stepped closer to the glass and dropped the bombshell: “I’m his daughter.”

Here’s the thing: Vandal Savage had two daughters in the comics. Scandal Savage pre-reboot,6 and Kassidy Sage post-reboot.7 Cassandra Savage—otherwise known as the blonde—was an amalgamation of those characters. I wasn’t shocked he had a daughter, even though it was shocking that somebody had actually fucked him. I hoped the sex had been consensual, but given the rape threats and the way he creepily touched Kendra whenever he could…I couldn’t be sure. That put Cassie wearing her bracelet in a totally squicky context. Still, one more thing was bothering me.

“Um,” I blurted, “if you’re half-Egyptian, why are you white?”8

Len snorted and covered his mouth to muffle his ensuing laughter. Mick guffawed without bothering to conceal the noise. Lisa snickered into her hand, hollowing her palm out to avoid smudging her lipstick.

Cassie blinked. Apparently she hadn’t anticipated that anticlimactic reaction. “What?” she asked.

“Savage was born in ancient Egypt,” I flailed one hand at her, “but you look like you belong to the Aryan Brotherhood. What’s up with that?”

“Charles Manson was a friend of my father’s,” Cassie told me with a conceited little smile, “as was Casper Crowell.”

Caspar Crowell had left the Aryan Brotherhood gang because he thought it wasn’t racially pure enough. Ugh.

“What’s up with the namedropping?” I wanted to know. “It doesn’t make your father look good. If anything, you’re associating him with people who accomplished more in their mortal lives than he did in centuries. It makes him look incompetent.”

Cassie scoffed. “Savage was competent enough to conquer the world,” she retorted.

I shrugged. “Savage hasn’t taken over the world yet,” I pointed out, “and your father loosing the Armageddon virus on the world before he nuked every major city on the planet isn’t something to brag about.”

If I’d had a mic, I would’ve dropped it. I walked out instead. Lisa and Mick followed me. Len glanced at Cassie over his shoulder, his varicolored eyes gone cold. Not because of Cassie, because he saw something else to hate about Savage when he looked at her. Len smoothly wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me closer to him with enough force that I knew he was upset. I kept walking, but made myself at home against the sideways line of his body.

“Per Degaton released the Armageddon virus!” Cassie shouted after us. “My father saved the world from him! My father is a hero!”

“Was that enough?” I asked him once we were out of earshot. “Or should I have mentioned the bruises on her neck?”

Len kissed the crown of my head and nuzzled my hair, the scent of my shampoo and probably my sweat uprooting some of the tension from his shoulders. “I’ve got everything I need to get whatever information we want out of her,” he murmured. “Thank you.”

I flopped into a chair once we were all in the captain’s quarters. Len folded himself onto the armrest beside me while Lisa folded her arms and leaned back against the wall.

Ray arched his eyebrows incredulously and gaped a little bit after Rip spilled the beans. “Vandal Savage has a daughter?” he asked.

“Apparently it’s true,” Martin said, “there’s a lid for every pot.”

“And this lid is gonna be very upset when he finds out we took his pot…” Jax unfolded his arms and flailed after everyone turned to look at him because of the implications of how he’d worded that, “…you know what I mean!”

“So what’s the problem?” Len gently squeezed my shoulder as I muffled a yawn in one palm. “It’s not like we’re on Savage’s Christmas card list.”

“And we snagged the bracelet,” Mick glanced at our winged avenger before he said, “you’re welcome, by the way.”

Ray put his hands on his hips and hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his jeans. “So we have to weaponize that thing before Savage notices that it and his daughter are missing,” he said.

Kendra spun on her heels with the grace of a warrior and smiled at Mick. “I’m going to need you to burn something for me,” she told him.

Mick grinned. “About time.”

“And we also need to figure out what we’re going to do with our new…” Rip made a disgruntled noise, “…guest.”

“She’s seen us and the ship,” Sara said. “If she runs back to Savage, we’re giving him a huge advantage.”

“So we make her our advantage,” Mick suggested, “we send him a finger, and we keep sending them until he puts his own head on the chopping block.”

Martin shook his head. “That is a positively lurid idea,” he said in a voice that oozed disdain. “I know we’re in the midst of a war, but can’t we maintain our honor?”

“I’d rather maintain my life, professor,” Mick retorted.

“If she is Savage’s daughter,” Sara murmured, “she would know the details of his defenses.”

“Yes, well…” Rip huffed. “How exactly are we going to get those details out of her?”

Len took my hand and kissed my fingers before he stood up smoothly. “I’m on it,” he said.

I felt him activate his radio frequency, which I took as permission to eavesdrop on his interrogation. Lisa went to watch Mick and Kendra forge the bracelet into a weapon. Ray, Martin, and Jax went to the scorched earth that had been an encampment. I went to the kitchen to eat something and Sara sat down across the countertop from me. I tapped my temple and held one finger up to my lips. Sara was smart enough to deduce that I was listening in; so instead of making small talk, she smiled without baring her teeth and assembled a snack for herself.

“Hello, Cassie,” Len said in his smoothest voice, “may I call you Cassie? Here’s the deal: you have information, I want it, the question is,” his tone slipped into something more sinister, “how am I going to get it?”

I heard footsteps as Cassie rose to her feet and moved closer to the glass separating them. “I am the daughter of Vandal Savage,” she told him, “the immortal ruler of the world. Do you think he hasn’t prepared me for this? Do you think I haven’t already been taught to endure the most extreme suffering?”

“Y’know,” Len said casually, too casually. “Your father sounds a lot like mine. Could never really say ‘I love you’…” his voice flattened and sharpened like a knife, “…except with his fists.”

I swallowed thickly. Len using his childhood trauma to get information we needed broke my heart, but I loved him more because he cared enough about the team to do it.

“Our fathers are nothing alike, Mr. Snart,” Cassie said in the same conceited voice from before, “fourteen years ago the world was ruled by a madman. Per Degaton unleashed the Armageddon virus in order to conquer the globe. It tore through the world like a fire,” her breath hitched softly and I caught the noise so I knew Len must’ve noticed, “billions died. Including my mother.”

There it was, the thing we could use to turn her against Savage.

“There were riots. Wars. Hell on earth. No one dared to stand up to him except for my father,” Cassie inhaled sharply, “he may not be a kind man, but he is the only one capable of putting this world back together. So you can torture me if you like. My suffering is a small price to pay.”

Len smirked and I could hear the smugness in his voice when he said: “Who said anything about torture?”

That’s when the noises started, thunderously loud and shaking the earth. Gideon told me that Martin and Ray had discovered ginormous footprints at the destroyed encampment. That, in the land of comic book science, meant one thing.

“Oh…” I groaned internally, I groaned externally, I groaned eternally. “Oh no.”

“What?” Sara asked with her mouth full.

I heaved a sigh after I booped the interface of the weapon heading toward us and confirmed my hypothesis. “Savage has a Jaeger,” I said, “and I don’t think we’re drift compatible.”

* * *

I couldn’t siphon the energy from the giant robot from inside the Waverider. I tried, but there was something blocking me. Still, it didn’t grab the ship and throw it like a child’s toy because I reinforced our shields and its arm ricocheted with enough force to knock it back. Which gave us time to fly away. Unfortunately the blow reverberated through the ship and we would’ve crash landed if I hadn’t used my powers to keep that from happening.

I blacked out from the effort it took to hold the ship in one piece and woke up when Len scooped me into his arms. I put one arm loosely around his neck and clutched at his shirt with the other. “I’m okay,” I protested on our way to the med bay, “put me down.”

“No,” Len retorted, “you’re exhausted and you’re overdoing it like you always do when there’s a crisis. I get that you’re keeping us alive, and I appreciate that, but there’s no point in living through this without you.”

I grinned, showing my slightly crooked teeth. “Love you too,” I told him softly. “Don’t worry. Once I get my hands on that giant robot—”

Len groaned and I felt the tension in him when his fingers flexed against one of my thunder thighs. “Please tell me you don’t mean that literally,” he said.

“Okay,” I grinned wider, “I won’t tell you that.”

Martin was sedated and sleeping off a gut wound he’d sustained when I got to the med bay. There were refugees all over the hallways of the ship, clinging to each other like they’d lost everything else. I kissed Len thoroughly before he went to finish what he’d started with Cassie, just in case I never got to do it again. Then I multitasked by simultaneously eavesdropping and plotting to get my hands on the giant robot. I was fizzing with burned out energy, like a can of soda pop going flat. It wasn’t a good feeling, but I digress.

“I was wrong,” Len snarled in a voice that oozed sarcasm, “your dad’s a _gem_.”

“My father is just doing what he must to save his daughter,” Cassie retorted.

“Whatever you say,” Len snarked back, “now where was I? Oh, right. Convincing you to help us.”

I could hear the smile in her voice when Cassie said: “What a charming euphemism for interrogation.”

“I know what you’re thinking,” Len said in his calmest voice, “my dad may not be perfect, but deep down he’s not a bad guy.” Then he opened the door of her cell.

“What are you doing?” Cassie asked, all quiet and perturbed.

“Showing you that when it comes to crap fathers, there is no deep down.” Len said with slow vehemence. “After you.”

I heard footsteps over the radio as Cassie left the brig. I heard the sharp intake of her breath, jagged and cutthroat, at the sight of the refugees. Whatever she said, I knew she was beginning to realize that her father had been lying to her for most of her life.

“Look,” said Len with a thread of vulnerability in his voice, “it took me a long time to accept that my old man was a monster. I’m betting you’re smarter than I am.”

“At last,” Cassie said, “something we agree on.”

Len was quiet for a short stretch of time and I made a mental note to give him cuddles later. “Oh,” he said in a tone of calculated nonchalance, “Per Degaton didn’t release the Armageddon virus. That was your father.”

“Impossible,” Cassie retorted, “he was only his tutor.”

“One: Per Degaton was a teenager at the time. Two: he was hardly a criminal mastermind,” Len told her. “Savage, however…”

Cassie got close enough to him that I could hear her more clearly. Which I didn’t like at all. “What makes you think I’d believe anything you tell me?” she wanted to know.

“Because seeing is believing,” Len retorted. “Gideon, show Cassie the footage. Kasnia, July thirty-first, 2147.”

“This isn’t true,” Cassie whispered, “you’re a liar.”

“Correct, but not about this,” Len told her truthfully, “and you know it, deep down.”

I heaved a sigh in a futile attempt to shake the weight of the world off my shoulders and shuffled out of the med bay. I shuffled into command central in time to hear Rip being a sadsack. Okay, that was mean, but he was making this all about saving his family. It wasn’t. There were people dying that our team could save right now. It was bigger than his losses—literally, since the thing killing people was a giant robot.

“I know you think the universe wants them dead,” Ray was saying, “but I don’t…” he glanced over his shoulder to see it was me standing behind him before he articulated, “…I don’t believe in fate. I believe in choices. We can choose to fight, even if that fight may be futile. We can save your family, Rip. It’s not impossible. All we have to do is—”

“—kill Vandal Savage,” Rip swallowed thickly, “the chances of which appear to be fading.”

“Not anymore,” Kendra told him. “I figured out how to do it.”

Len smoothly wrapped an arm around me, his cold fingers gently squeezing my flabby waist through my dress. “And my new bestie can get us in,” he deadpanned.

“I think I’ve got a way to stop the giant robot that’s coming to kill us,” Ray added.

“If you can immobilize it,” I said, “I can siphon the energy that powers it and fry its operating system.”

Ray grinned crookedly. “‘Today we are cancelling the apocalypse,’” he told me.9

“Now,” Rip interjected before I got a chance to quote the movie back at him, “you may not believe in fate, Raymond, but I certainly do, and perhaps it was fate that compelled me to bring you eight together so we can change this future. Once and for all.”

* * *

Ray had a plan to power the exosuit by using the auxiliary time drive to reverse the polarity of the dwarf star matrix. I had no idea how that was going to work; but things didn’t have to make sense in the land of comic book science. Jax was tinkering with the charger as the footsteps of the giant robot boomed in the distance. Not quite thunderous, but ominous enough.

“You know,” Jax said, “if this doesn’t work…”

“I’ll turn every cell in my body inside-out?” Ray quipped halfheartedly.

“I was gonna go with die, but…yeah.” Jax sighed and squared his shoulders. “You know, we could’ve escaped on the jump ship, but we’re doing this to save everybody that we brought on the Waverider. You’re the real hero here,” he shifted his weight from one foot to the other and he didn’t even flinch when my eyes whited out. “You both are.”

I smiled at him before I fluxed the geomagnetic field and flew up, up, and away. Ray embiggened until he was approximately the size of a giant robot. I wanted to make a dirty joke about size kinks, but then the giant robot loomed in the near distance. Ray took a step toward it, and shook the earth. Jax ran back inside the Waverider to monitor his vitals. Apparently the embiggening was precarious. Which wasn’t a shock, pun unintended. Ray had theories, but we had no idea what kind of longterm effects it would have on the atomic level.

I eavesdropped on the team at the citadel while Ray fought the giant robot. I couldn’t get close until he knocked it down, not if I wanted to stay alive and uncrushed by several tons of dwarf star alloy. Kendra swooped down and snatched up Savage.

“FINISH HIM,” I whispered over the radio.10

Kendra laughed as the updraft of her wings furling _whooshed_ through the frequency. Then she landed and struck at her immortal enemy.

I felt every blow she dealt, the otherworldly energy that cursed them and tethered their long lives to each other. Ray knocked the giant robot onto its back and I landed on its face as beams of compressed light blasted its chest. I peeled back the metal and stuck my hand inside to feel the power, to steal it. That’s when it shot Ray, and he fell to earth with a _thud_ that shook the burning city.

“Get up, Ray!” I heard Jax yell. “Get up!”

That’s when Savage made a pained noise that resonated over the radio.

“This is for Carter,” I heard Kendra snarl.

What followed was a scuffle devoid of the blue energy I’d tasted in 1975, so I knew she wasn’t fighting Savage. I heard her gasp, the sound a broken gust of air torn out of her throat. There was a hollow echo as she removed her helmet.

“Your love reincarnated,” I heard Savage tell her, “he doesn’t even remember who he was…and he never will.”

“What?” Kendra bit down around the consonant.

“When I first discovered him,” Savage explained with relish. “When I found out that he had no idea about his real identity, I took my precautions and I locked away his mind.”

“You brainwashed him!” Kendra shouted and attacked him again.

I was all lit up, glowing blue and bright with electricity. I felt it when Ray’s heart stopped, and brought him back to life with only a thought. Kendra was forced to choose between ending Savage and saving her soulmate. I would’ve made the same choice in a heartbeat. I hoped I’d never have to.

(Oh, the irony.)

* * *

It was twilight by the time we all returned to the ship, sunshine blooming into the darkness that was fading. I would’ve thought it was symbolic, if I hadn’t been so exhausted. I’d been awake for almost three days at this point.

Cassie watched us lock up her father in the brig. I noticed her stealing glances at Len, lingering with her eyes while she kept her hands folded in front of her. I couldn’t even blame her, since he’d told her something it had taken him months of dating to tell me. Savage had probably isolated Cassie from any kind of real emotional support after her mother died. Len might’ve destroyed her worldview, but he’d made her stronger for it. That was enough to make anyone fall a little bit in love.

I still pulled him down by the lapel of his leather jacket and kissed him in the hallway where she could see. Was it petty? Hell yes. Did I give a fuck? Hell no.

Len made a smug noise low in his throat when he kissed me back. Lisa took Cassie to meet the Resistance leaders at the beginning of her long overdue rebellious daughter phase, but we were so focused on each other that we didn’t even notice them leave. Len broke the kiss and pressed our foreheads together. I’d closed my eyes, but I could hear the smirk in his voice when he said: “You were jealous, hmm?”

I squawked indignantly, but I knew he wasn’t wrong. “Yes,” I huffed. “You aren’t the only jealous loser in this marriage, I guess.”

“Good,” Len told me smoothly before he opened the door to our room and stood waiting for me to go inside. “After you.”

I propped my cane against the wall and toed off my orthopedic shoes with a yawn I muffled in one palm. Len shucked his jacket and kicked off his own shoes before he wrapped his arms around my waist and held me with his whole body, nuzzling my neck and giving my throat light kisses. I shivered in his arms and my toes curled against the cold metallic floor. Len unbuttoned my dress and sparks ignited when he tugged the sleeves off my shoulders. I snuffed them out before he cupped my breasts, greedily squeezing them through the silk and lace of my bra.

“You’re glowing,” he murmured lowly into my ear. “Let’s see if I can make you _shine_.”

That’s when he cupped me through my panties and teased me through the silky fabric. I whimpered when he yanked down the lace trimmed cup of my bra to rub my left nipple roughly in between his calloused thumb and forefingers. Len folded himself into the desk chair, licking a long wet line up from the base of my spine to the nape of my neck and inducting electricity that danced over my skin. Then he pulled me down so I was sitting on his lap and used his knees to spread my thighs apart. At some point he’d taken his pants off. I figured he’d thought ahead and dropped them before he started touching me.

I tilted my head back onto his shoulder and nipped the hollow under his jawbone. Len made a low noise that moved through his chest and belly. I was close enough to feel it skim along my spine, heavy and palpable.

“Len,” I moaned, “please don’t tease me.”

“Why?” Len nuzzled my hair. “Not in the mood?”

I shook my head slowly. “No time,” I whispered.

Len slipped his hand inside my panties and groaned when he felt how slick I was. “There’s always time for this,” he told me softly.

Then he swirled one fingertip over my clit. I jolted, clutching at the flannel covering his forearm, and squirmed. Len kissed the words tattooed along the curve of my shoulder and kept playing with my clit until I unspooled, intense and electric. I was gasping when he moved my panties aside with his thumb and worked two fingers inside me. Instead of fucking me with his fingers, he slipped them out and sucked my slick off them.

Len fucked me hard after that, using his knees to make me bounce up and down on his cock. I came again and clenched tight around him as lightning shone inside me. Len nuzzled the crook of my neck, burying low throaty sounds there when he came. I cleaned myself up before I crawled into bed with him to take a nap. I might’ve tried to stay awake if I’d known how wrong he was.

There was never enough time.

* * *

**Scene III**  
Matrix of Destiny 

* * *

I was asleep when we jumped into hypertime with Savage in the brig. At some point during our power nap Len had ended up on top of me with his face buried in my cleavage. According to him, my breasts made great pillows. I squirmed to fetch my glasses from on top of the desk, put them on, and stroked his short hair while I accessed the surveillance feed in the brig. I couldn’t use my powers in hypertime for some reason, so I asked Gideon to show me the footage on the screen attached to the wall in our room. Apparently people had been talking to Savage, who hadn’t been knocked out or tied up for some unfathomable reason. Instead he was just standing there staring intently at his reflection in the glass of the cell. Almost like the immortal psychopath was waiting for something to go wrong.

Len nuzzled the swell of my left breast and cuddled me closer, his arms around my waist and his big hands splayed over my back in between my body and the sheets. “I’d say good morning,” he murmured, “but I have no idea what time it actually is.”

“I think it’s time to get up,” I told him softly.

Len made a disgruntled noise in protest, but he rolled off me and flopped onto his back so I could get out of bed and find clean clothes to wear. After we’d both gotten dressed, I shuffled over to kiss him. Len curled his fingers into my hair and kissed me back, unhurried and meticulous. I broke the kiss and nuzzled his nose with mine before we left the room.

Mick had found a bottle of seventeenth century scotch and he was passing it around command central despite Rip yawping at him from the captain’s quarters. “We can toast to the mission almost accomplished,” he said before he belched. I flopped into the seat across from the captain’s chair and arched my eyebrows at him until he looked away and said, “Excuse me.”

“We should be toasting to Savage’s death,” Sara muttered before she passed the bottle to Lisa.

“We shouldn’t be celebrating murder,” Martin insisted, “and Savage still has Carter brainwashed.”

Len folded himself into the chair next to his sister and shook his head slowly after Lisa offered the bottle of scotch to him. “I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, professor,” he said in his calmest, deadliest voice, “but murdering Savage was always the plan.”

“Besides,” Mick moved to stand by the chair in between me and my husband, “Carter reincarnates, which is more than I can say about us.”

“Savage is a threat to everyone on this ship as long as he’s on board and breathing,” Lisa pointed out, “he killed Mac once, and he’s murdered Kendra and Carter hundreds of times—”

“So what?” Kendra cut in. “We kill Savage and leave Carter a brainless drone?”

Mick nodded. “Yes,” he said with slow finality.

I could’ve suggested that I could try to undo the brainwashing, since I could theoretically control minds. I figured Carter—or whatever his name was in this lifetime—had been through enough without me fucking with his mind, so I didn’t.

That’s when Ray and Jax emerged from the hallway into command central. “Sorry we’re late,” Ray said, “but we found something.”

“We’ve been running diagnostics on Ray’s suit after the battle with Savage’s rock ’em sock ’em robot,” Jax explained.

“Telemetry data included a comprehensive scan of the robot’s tech,” Ray told Rip as the scan appeared on the tabletop and wall screens.

“Amazing,” Martin intoned, “the neuromorphic is astonishingly futuristic.”

“Yeah,” Kendra told him with equal parts fondness and indulgence, “it’s from 2166.”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Jax said, “it’s not.”

“This technology is lightyears more advanced than anything from 2166,” Ray clarified.

“Who cares?” Len snarked back.

“Time Masters,” Rip said, “the Time Masters refused to take action against Savage because he didn’t pose a threat to the timeline, but this means he’s been engaging in the exact same manipulations of time the Time Council was designed to prevent!”

Sara followed that logic to its natural conclusion. “So now they’ll finally sign off on undoing all of the damage Savage has done to the world,” she postulated.

“Last time I checked,” Mick said, “the Time Council was at the edge of the timeline, and this bucket of bolts is barely holding itself together as it is.”

I heaved a sigh. I hadn’t wanted to say anything until I was sure, but this proved my theory that Savage had been in cahoots with the Time Masters all along. “How do you think Savage got ahold of futuristic technology?” I asked Rip. “How do you think he’s been concealing his movements throughout history? Hell, you were the one who said it was impossible to obscure your movements through time—”

“Unless,” Len unfurled the sibilant in a soft hiss that pressed his tongue against his teeth, “the Time Masters are on his side.”

“No,” Rip snapped, “that’s not possible.”

“Why not?” I wanted to know. “I think it makes a lot of sense, actually.”

Kendra gave me a horrified look as comprehension dawned. “Why else would they let someone like Savage conquer the world?” she asked.

“Only way that makes any sense is…” Sara took another drink from the bottle of scotch, “…if they’ve been on his side all along.”

“No!” Rip shouted. “No, I refuse to believe the Time Masters could ever throw in with a monster like Vandal Savage. Gideon,” he grabbed the bottle and downed what was left of the scotch, “what’s the status of the time drive?”

“Stable, Captain,” xe informed him.

Rip took the empty bottle with him when he went to sit in the captain’s chair. “Plot a course for the Vanishing Point,” he told xyr, “tonight Vandal Savage faces justice for his crimes.”

* * *

Rip stalked out of command central in a huff after that. Apparently he was going to confront Savage, as if he could believe a word the immortal psychopath said. There was no way Savage had figured out time travel by himself. Not when he kept namedropping people like Hitler or Houdini or Stalin instead of making a name for himself. Savage was _limited_ , and he knew it. I doubted he’d consolidated his power and conquered the world without their help.

“Why doesn’t he ever listen to you?” Sara wondered irritably.

I shrugged. “Rip was raised by the Time Masters,” I pointed out, “he was homeschooled at their orphanage before he went to their academy, and he captained one of their time ships for thirteen years. If they’re evil, then his whole life was a lie. That’s not acceptable to him, so he’s not going to acknowledge the possibility until he’s forced to. I get it, even though I think he’s being a douchewaffle.”

Lisa snickered at the word _douchewaffle_. Nobody else laughed. Not even Len. Instead he stood up smoothly and came to lean against the armrest of my chair. I reached out for his hand and he intertwined our fingers, idly sweeping his thumb back and forth between my knuckles.

“If the Time Masters are evil,” Mick said, “then we’ve got bigger problems than Rip’s impending meltdown.”

“If they’re working with Savage,” Len retorted, “then Rip is flying us into a trap.”

Lisa eventually broke the awkward silence that ensued by standing up with a harsh metallic _clack_ of her heels against the floor. “Welp,” she said, “I’m not doing this sober.”

Then she went to break into Rip’s liquor cabinet for more booze. Which was as good a plan as any. I slipped out of my seat after I had Gideon show me the surveillance feed and watched Rip leave the brig. It was my turn to talk to Savage.

I side-eyed the coat of knives hanging just outside his cell and wondered why no one had put it elsewhere. Savage didn’t say anything, so I started to brew the storm.

“I’ve read the _Agricola_ ,” I told him, “‘auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.’ They destroy, massacre, ravage, usurp, and call it empire, but make a wasteland and call it peace,” I propped myself against the wall and he watched me put my hands in the pockets of my skirt, “except the word ‘sōlitūdō’ doesn’t translate as ‘wasteland.’ It means any place of solitude, but since Tacitus used the accusative singular conjugation, people translate it into English as ‘desert’ or ‘desolation’ or ‘wasteland.’ Lord Byron is the only person I know of who actually translates the line using the word ‘solitude.’”

Savage nodded. “ _Bride of Abydos_ ,” he said in a voice that was slick in a gross way, “but of course you know the classics. After all, you were a literature major in college. Mackenzie Howell, Seattle University undergraduate class of 2011, graduated _magna cum laude_ despite the tragic death of your parents. I can understand why you’d settle for a man like Leonard Snart so soon after you lost the only family you ever had. All that money and no one to share it with. All those stories about love on your bookshelves, but no one to love you.” Then he pinned me with a stare. “What would you say if I offered to change their destiny for you?”

Here’s the thing: when I arrived on Earth-1, I’d created a fake tragic backstory to explain why I had so much money. I’d been the last daughter of a wealthy family, the sole heiress to a huge fortune whose parents had died in a car accident en route to her college graduation. Savage was trying to use them against me. If any of that was real, I might not have noticed what he was doing; but it wasn’t, so I did.

I giggled. I couldn’t help it! If he thought he could manipulate me, then he had another think coming. I was surprised he didn’t know I was from a parallel universe, since the Time Masters had to know. Maybe I was wrong when I assumed Savage had offered them some kind of incentive to get them on his side. Maybe this was their game and he was just a pawn, a means to whatever end they wanted to achieve.

Savage actually looked shocked when I laughed at him. It was just a slip in one corner of his oily smile, but I caught that chink in his armor. I’d thrown off his groove. Awesome.

I gave him a megavolt smile. “Mackenzie Howell isn’t real, dude. I made her up. I was born in a future that doesn’t exist anymore. I grew up in an alternate universe. I had to create a fake identity after I came to this world. I’m sure you understand the concept, since you’ve probably had to reinvent yourself a few times, even though you’ve been moving throughout history instead of living through it.” I muffled a yawn in one palm before I continued. “All you’ve done for four thousand years is whisper in the ears of powerful men. Never did anything by yourself. I know you’re in cahoots with the Time Masters. Otherwise you wouldn’t’ve been competent enough to conquer the world and they wouldn’t’ve let ninety-five percent of the global population die. It’s like a symbiotic relationship, except you’re two parasites feeding off each other. Here’s the thing, though: you think you’re a master of time, but ‘fātīs fortiōribus ego.’ Not yours. Not ever.”11

I’d read the _Agricola_ when I was twelve, during my Greco-Roman phase. I’d read his _Histories_ too, in which Tacitus had written: _deos fortiōribus adesse_. That was “the gods are on the side of the stronger” in Latin. I’d reworded the quote to say “fate is on my side.”

(Oh, the irony.)

* * *

Sara and Kendra were questioning Carter. I didn’t know whether they’d discussed the possibility of polyamory yet, but I had a feeling it would be the ideal solution for everyone—especially if Sara wanted to rekindle that old flame with Nyssa once we returned to the present. Rip, meanwhile, was pushing the Waverider beyond its limits to get to the Vanishing Point as soon as possible. Jax went to repair the time drive to keep us from being marooned in hypertime and got hit with a blast of temporal radiation. Apparently being half of Firestorm didn’t make him immune to the Bleed, the noxious substance that occupied the space between worlds.

I was in the kitchen eating lunch with Len, Lisa and Mick, who’d tried the weird twenty-second century snacks and spat all of them out.

“Why are all the snacks in the future sugar free?” he asked with a sullen snarl.

Lisa shrugged. “So much for progress,” she quipped.

Len twisted his pinkie ring around his finger while I ate a cheesy baked potato I’d made. “You remember Alexa?” he asked Mick.

“Yeah,” Mick answered with his mouth full.

“Security deposit job,” Lisa specified.

Mick paused to spit out another sugar free snack before he asked, “What about it?”

Len quit playing with his pinkie ring after he saw that I was done eating and took my hand in his instead. “Just had a feeling about that one,” he said as he mapped the corrugation of my knuckles with his thumb, “a sixth sense things would end badly.”

“They would have if you hadn’t pulled us out of there,” Mick retorted. “So what?”

“I’m getting the same feeling now,” Len murmured in the most vulnerable tone I’d ever heard come out of his mouth.

I tuned in using my earpiece and eavesdropped on Rip in the captain’s quarters, only to overhear him telling Ray: “Mr. Jackson is currently in the med bay facing death caused by temporal radiation exposure.”

“Wait,” Ray said. “What?”

“I sent him to repair the time drive,” Rip explained. “I could’ve gone myself. Now I’m left to wonder if, in some way, I did it because of the risk.”

“So you sent Jax on a suicide mission,” Ray deduced with a sharp tone in his voice. “So that you could stay alive to save your family?”

“I don’t know, Ray,” said Rip. “That’s what vexes me.”

“You know what vexes me?” I heard Sara cut in from the entrance of the captain’s quarters, where she’d been listening in too. “Thinking that we’ve thrown in with a captain who cares more about himself than he does his crew.”

Ray followed Sara as she went to check on Kendra, only to find Carter strangling her. Sara pulled him off her girlfriend and punched him in the face. Ray didn’t have a crush on Kendra anymore, but he’d lived with her for ten months in 1958 and he didn’t like seeing his friends get hurt. So he went to ask Savage how to undo the brainwashing while Sara glowered at her girlfriend’s soulmate.

I stood up abruptly, but that didn’t make Len stop holding my hand. “Mac,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“Jax is dying,” I told him, “it’s Rip’s fault.”

Mick swore and spat out another futuristic snack. Lisa frowned until her mouth was a thin red line, her blue eyes cold and harsh. Len rose to his feet, still holding my hand, and we left the kitchen.

“Are you sure certain these results are accurate?” Martin asked, his voice serrated with dismay. “Jefferson’s blood chemistry is akin to that of a—”

“—sixty-three-year-old man?” Gideon supplied.

“Actually, I don’t feel a day over sixty,” Jax quipped.

“This isn’t funny,” Mick snarled.

“No,” Len growled, “and it’s all Rip’s fault.”

That’s when Jax tried to get up, only to sit down again because of his aching back.

“I’m afraid he’s also suffering from early stage osteoarthritis,” Gideon informed us.

“This is how your joints feel all the time, isn’t it?” Jax asked me.

I nodded. “I know that feel,” I told him softly, “and it sucks. I’m so sorry.”

“Yes,” Martin put a tentative hand on Jax’s shoulder, “exposure to the temporal radiation has led to an accelerated rate of intercellular degeneration.”

Len folded his arms and heaved a sigh in a futile attempt to calm himself down. I tucked my hand in the crook of his elbow and nuzzled his shoulder through his jacket and shirtsleeve. Len squeezed my fingers and I knew he wasn’t letting go of my hand anytime soon.

“This is what happens when Rip decides to go with Plan B,” Lisa said flatly.

“Plan A was bashing Savage’s head in with that mace,” Mick told the professor.

“We are trying to solve this without bloodshed!” Martin shouted.

Mick scoffed. “How’s that working out for you, Gandhi?”

“Look,” Jax winced in pain after he tried to sit up, “there’s nothing we can do about it now.”

Mick unfolded his arms and stuffed one gloved hand in the pocket of his jacket. “We can talk to Hunter,” he said.

Jax sighed. “Even if Kendra were to kill Savage,” he said, “my situation is still the same.”

“We’re talking about our situation,” Mick retorted.

“We’re not waiting around for the other shoe to drop.” Len squeezed my fingers and flicked his gaze to Jax. “You deserved better,” he said with slow vehemence. Then he turned with me and we left arm in arm, my cane making hollow sounds against the floor.

“Alexa?” Lisa asked once we were halfway down the hallway.

“You bet,” Mick answered.

Len took my hand and untucked it from the crook of his elbow to hold it when we stormed the captain’s quarters. Rip tore his gaze away from the maps festooned over the navigation table, looking frayed and guilty.

“We need to talk,” Lisa told him.

“We saw what you did to Jax,” Len snarled.

Mick stopped at the edge of the table. “We’re worried it’s just the beginning,” he said with soft menace.

Rip heaved a sigh and huffed: “the beginning of what?”

“It’s like I said,” Lisa snarked back, “as long as Savage is alive and on this ship, he’s dangerous.”

Rip heaved another sigh before he said, “the time drive is rebooting. We will soon be on our way. I’m asking for a little faith, gentlemen.”

I snorted. Rip had no faith in our abilities beyond what we could do for _him_. This mission had always been about saving his family first and saving the world second. I wondered: if he couldn’t have the former, would he be satisfied with the latter? It scared me that I didn’t know the answer to that question by now.

“Sorry,” Len retorted, “fresh out.”

Rip looked at the quiet man to our left. “I take it you and the Snarts are of the same mind?” he asked.

“Yes,” Mick answered without hesitation.

Rip hunched in defeat and turned to look at Sara, who stood behind us. “What of you, Ms. Lance?” he wondered.

Sara folded her arms. “You’re the one who said you’d sell us out for your family,” she pointed out.

“Well,” Rip said, “if that’s how you all feel, none of you are obliged to continue on this voyage with me. As I told Martin, the jump ship can make a one-time voyage back to 2016.”

I was overwhelmed by the possibility that we could go home. There was a part of me that didn’t want to leave, not when I knew Savage was in cahoots with the Time Masters and Rip was voyaging into a trap. I didn’t want to abandon Ray, or Kendra, or Sara, or leave without accomplishing the mission…but I was homesick and sick of being on the Waverider. I didn’t want to keep going if Rip kept being selfish and shortsighted.

It sucked being torn between the past, present, and future. Let’s put it that way.

“You saying it’s ours?” Mick asked.

“I’m saying,” Rip gnashed his teeth, “this mission has always been a voluntary enterprise.”

“And the mission was to kill Savage,” Len pointed out.

“Which doesn't seem to be on the table anymore,” Lisa added just as sharply.

Rip heaved yet another sigh in a futile attempt to unclench. “Very well,” he said, “leave, if that’s—”

Lisa flipped her hair as she spun on her heels and walked out. “It’s been a blast, Rip.”

Len kissed my fingers before he turned and tucked my hand back into the crook of his elbow. “Good luck getting to the Vanishing Point,” he snarked over his shoulder.

“Tell your pals Chronos says ‘kiss my ass,’” Mick deadpanned.

“What about you, Sara?” I heard Rip asking over the radio.

“Never been one to run from a fight,” Sara answered.

* * *

I ground to a halt in the hall outside the hull where the jump ship lived. Len stopped with my hand still in his instead of letting go. I shuffled closer to him until my body was flush against his, inhaling the sharp icy smell of his skin and turning my head so I could hear his heart beating in his chest. Len smoothed his other hand up and down along the length of my spine, a closed loop. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Savage kills us all in 2021 in one of the darkest timelines,” I said. “What if this is how we fail to stop him, by cutting our losses and going back to 2016?”

Lisa exhaled sharply, her nostrils flaring. “I don’t want a future where we’re all dead, Lenny,” she told him softly. “I don’t think we should leave. Not until Savage is no longer a threat to us.”

“Mac,” Mick said my name so quietly it was almost intimate, “you’ve got a friend in the present who can travel through time. If you’re worried about Savage, we can find a way to kill him and make sure that future never happens.”

I gnawed on the inside of my cheek. I did know where Savage would be: December twenty-third, 2015. Saf could take me back to 1958 to steal the dagger from the Knox house. Kendra could kill Savage with it that night and none of this would ever happen. I exhaled with enough force to flap my lips and nodded. “Okay.”

Len tilted my chin up and hunched to kiss my forehead. “Now let’s get the hell out of here,” he said.

Unfortunately things didn’t go according to plan, because Martin launched the jump ship with Jax on board to cure his temporal radiation sickness, and we arrived a few seconds too late to return to the present.

“What’d you do, Poindexter?” Mick growled once he saw that the jump ship was gone.

“What do you mean?” Martin asked.

Lisa glared at the professor harshly enough to make him flinch. “Where’s the jump ship?” she wanted to know.

“It’s really more a question of when,” Martin told her, “but you all wanted to return to 2016.”

That’s when Mick shoved him against the closed doors with one hand and held up the other in a fist, a blow waiting for a deal to strike.

“Got it in one,” Len snarled.

“I did what I had to do to save Jefferson’s life,” Martin told him, “now we must do whatever’s necessary to repair the Waverider and deliver Savage to the Vanishing Point.”

I swallowed thickly. Jax’s life was more important than going home. Unequivocally. “What if he’s in cahoots with the Time Masters, like I said?” I asked.

“Then Mr. Rory was right and we have bigger problems than Savage,” Martin answered, “but at least we’ll be able to see what we’re up against once we get to the edge of the timeline.”

That’s how we ended up back in command central. Lisa helped Rip repair the navigational system while the time drive was rebooting. Sara was crouched down beside them, keeping an eye on their tinkering. Martin stood at the head of the table, watching their progress on the tabletop screen. Mick was sulking in his seat instead of helping with the repairs, which he could’ve done because he’d had his own time ship when he was Chronos. Len kept twisting his pinkie ring around his finger in agitation. I wondered why Ray was nowhere to be seen.

“Time drive re-initialization complete, Captain,” Gideon informed Rip, “the primary systems are back online and stable.”

“Begin ignition sequence and resume our route to the Vanishing Point,” Rip told xyr from where he was kneeling under the table.

Mick side-eyed Martin and hunched petulantly in his seat. “You’re a fool, professor,” he said.

“I was trying to save Jefferson’s life,” Martin told him gravely.

That’s when Ray stumbled out of the hallway. “Savage has escaped,” he wheezed.

Rip gnashed his teeth on the consonant when he said, “What?”

Len stood up smoothly and put his goggles on. “No,” he told me when I untucked my bad ankle from its warm place beneath my knee, “you’re staying here.”

I arched my eyebrows at him in a nonverbal _do I need to recite our wedding vows again?_

“Mac,” Len knelt before me with the cold gun in one hand and cupped my face in the other, “you can’t use your powers here and I can’t lose you again. Please.”

Savage had killed me before. If he got another chance, he’d kill me again. Only without the Velocity 6 serum to bring me back. However that had worked. I still had no idea why I wasn’t addicted to the speedster drug, but more on that later.

I kissed him hard and let him go. Not a goodbye, a _don’t you dare die_.

(Oh, the irony.)

“I’m sorry,” Ray gasped as he leaned against the back of my seat for support.

“Gideon,” Rip yawped, “pull up all surveillance monitors, now!”

“I’m afraid Vandal Savage has already freed Carter Hall, and is preparing to disengage my…” Gideon informed us before xyr disembodied voice warped and went silent.

“That can’t be good,” Sara murmured as she looked down at the blank tabletop screen.

“Gideon’s entire operational matrix is offline,” Martin deduced, “and without xyr help…”

“We’ll have to make our approach the old fashioned way,” Rip told him.

“Shouldn’t we be more worried about Savage and his brainwashed crony?” Mick asked.

“Yes,” said Rip. “Which is why I need you and Dr. Palmer to go and recapture him. In the meantime, if the rest of us can’t figure out how to pilot the ship without Gideon, we’ll never be able to leave the time stream.”

That’s when I left command central to fetch something Cisco had made for me, a weapon I hadn’t bothered to use because I had my powers most of the time. It looked like a cane. One a manga heroine might’ve used to transform into a magical girl, because Cisco was awesome that way. If we might not ever go home, I figured I could probably go big.

“Come to join the party?” I heard Lisa ask Mick while I stood at the other end of the hallway with my cane fizzing, converting the charge it had accumulated electrostatically into a dynamic current.

“You should’ve left me back in 2166!” Savage bleated.

“Yeah,” Mick shouted, “we know that, mullet head!”

“Who are you to stand up against me,” he shrieked, “Vandal Savage, destroyer of empires?”

“Leonard Snart,” Len snarked back, “robber of ATMs!”

That’s when the battle split in two: Len, Lisa, and Mick against Savage and Kendra, Ray, and me against Carter 2.0.

“I got this,” Kendra told Ray after she dodged the mace and punched Carter in the face, “go handle Savage.”

Savage took all of them out despite it being five against one. Sara captained the ship while Rip came to act as our belated backup. Savage fired oodles of laser blasts. I used my cane to generate an electromagnetic field that blocked them, but still the force of the blast knocked me down. I might’ve gotten another concussion. Which made me too discombobulated to get up and fight back. I winced and watched Savage shoot Rip, my perception glossing over at the edges. I crawled over to where my husband had fallen and tried not to cry after I felt his heart beating.

Carter held Kendra until the immortal psychopath took her from him to strangle her and his wings unfurled, his mind unlocked. Savage got his ass kicked a little bit, but it wasn’t enough to keep him from gutstabbing Hawkman once he recollected himself. Carter saw Kendra and said her name before he fell to the floor. Kendra screeched and surged up, knocking Savage back so hard his skull bashed against the wall.

Rip went to check her soulmate’s pulse. “Oh,” he exhaled a short gust of sheer relief, “he’s alive. You saved him. You saved us all.”

* * *

Rip called for an assembly of the Time Council once we reached the Vanishing Point and took Savage along with him when he went to justify his crimes. I had to pee, so I was doing my lady business when the ship was boarded. At least the Time Goons—Time Guards? Time Soldiers? Time Drones? Yeah, I’m going with Time Goons—let me wash my hands before they cuffed me. I used my cane to lower myself onto the floor and side-eyed Rip, whose cell was next to mine.

“I told you so,” I deadpanned.

* * *

**Scene IV**  
The Function of Myth 

* * *

Here’s the thing: as soon as I realized the Time Masters were possibly and probably in cahoots with Savage, I dug into their history. Here’s what I learned:

Michelle Carter won three Olympic gold medals in gymnastics when she was sixteen. From there, she’d become a research librarian who—in traveling through time to flesh out history—discovered the Vanishing Point and became the first Time Master in the year 2491.12 Bonnie Baxter—her college sweetheart—was the mechanic who had built the first time ship. It was more like the jump ship than the Waverider or the Acheron, meant to carry one person or a few, so Bonnie and Michelle went traveling through time together along with Bonnie’s younger sister Lottie Baxter—short for Charlotte, because in the comics she’d been Bonnie’s brother Corky,13 but in this reality Lottie was a trans woman—and Jeffrey Smith,14 her boyfriend. Lottie and Jeff had a daughter named Eve, who’d grown up into the captain of the Time Masters’ temporal fleet. It was as much her legacy as Rip’s, becoming a Time Master.

Michael Jon Carter wasn’t an Olympian. From college football star to college dropout to working at the Time Lab because no one but his sister would give him a job, he’d failed epically at everything until he became a Time Master. It was, truly, the best thing that had ever happened to him. After ten years of rediscovering his family and having adventures all throughout space and time, he thought his life was perfect—even as their enterprise was whittled down to just him and his sister. Until everything changed.

Michelle had gone to the twentieth century and fallen for a countess, whom she married, and left Booster alone in the Vanishing Point. That’s when he made the rule against Time Masters forming attachments. Time passed. Druce, who’d chosen his alias by tracing his genealogy back to Robert Plot—a seventeenth century English naturalist after whom the nineteenth century botanist George Claridge Druce had named Plot’s Elm, a variety of Field Elm he discovered—became a Time Master, and others followed.

Then, predictably, Booster fell in love and broke the rules by not only marrying Ted Kord, but also having a son. This, too, would be Rip’s legacy. Booster was still at large—as neither the Time Masters nor their mercenaries had managed to find him after the mutiny that forced him to flee the Vanishing Point—but they’d killed his sister and her wife, effectively orphaning his son.

Things fell apart, the center could not hold, and mere anarchy was loosed upon spacetime. Yeats said it best: “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”15

Anyhow.

Now that I’d actually seen the Vanishing Point, I knew Savage was their pawn and not the other way around. This was the way they lived: immortal, alone with each other and apart from the world, distancing themselves from real time and space by perpetually existing in hypertime itself. No wonder they could seek to preserve a future where Savage ruled the world. I doubted the world mattered to them in the present tense. For these people, it was historiography waiting to happen.

Martin was looking blue around the edges. If he exploded from his lack of proximity to Jax, I wondered whether his cell would contain the fallout. Hell, people didn’t age in the Vanishing Point. If they wanted to, they could keep us here forever. That was a fate worse than death.

“Martin, are you okay?” Kendra asked him softly.

“I’m required to merge with Jefferson periodically in order to maintain nuclear cohesion,” Martin explained between phlegmy coughs that crawled out of his throat and shook his whole body.

“Then sending him away on the jump ship probably wasn’t the greatest idea,” Mick deadpanned.

“Given the circumstances we’re under, I’m surprised any of us are alive,” Martin retorted.

“Oh, you’ll be dead soon,” Mick muttered, “you’re getting off easy.”

“What gives you the free pass?” Ray wanted to know.

Mick looked away, because having a staring contest with the floor was more fun than answering that question with the truth. “They have other plans for me,” he told him.

“As Chronos,” Kendra said quietly.

“They’re going to try and put me through the induction process again,” Mick clarified.

“Brainwashing?” Martin asked weakly.

Mick nodded. “Kills most men, professor, and those that don’t die…end up like mindless _goats_.”

Here’s the thing: Mick’s abusive father had goats on the farm before it burned down. Mick hated those goats. They ate his wet clothes when he hung the laundry out to dry. They’d eaten his flannel shirts, chewed holes in the socks his grandmother had knitted for him and snacked on his shit stomping boots—his words, not mine. Mick swore up and down that his father’s goats were evil incarnate, but I digress.

“Len said you weren’t mindless when you were Chronos,” I pointed out.

“Not any more than usual, anyway,” Kendra quipped.

Mick exhaled a soft flicker of rueful laughter. “The whole time, I stayed focused on one thing,” he murmured. “The one thing that kept me sane…vengeance. I focused on how much I hated all of you.”

I swallowed thickly. “‘There’s nothing more important than family,’” I whispered, “‘except maybe revenge.’”16

That’s when the Time Goons returned to take Mick away. I clutched the handle of my cane, my knuckles going bloodless as I gnawed on the inside of my cheek. I’d bitten all my fingernails to the quick. I hated feeling powerless and hated _being_ powerless more.

“Ah, gentlemen!” Mick opened his arms and even his body language was sarcastic. “I missed you. Ah, that’s it…” he grinned as they grabbed him. I’d forgotten how much he liked pain, under the right circumstances. “Oh yeah, break my arm.”

Kendra put up a fight once they’d yanked her from her cell: spreading her wings and flipping the bird—or, more specifically, a hawkish demigoddess—in the literal sense of the phrase, by flying and taking out a pair of goons before the third shot her in the back.

That’s when I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Time Masters were the worst. Anyone who could give Kendra to Savage deserved to die. Slowly.

I heaved a sigh and flopped back against the wall of my cell. Len, Lisa, and Sara weren’t here. Which meant they hadn’t been captured. Which in turn meant they would come for us. I hated the idea of waiting for my husband to rescue me like I was a damsel in distress, but I didn’t know what else I could do. There was charge in the cane I could’ve used to generate a shockwave and shatter the cell, but I didn’t know whether I had enough power to get Ray and Martin out after I was free.

I thought about leaving Martin in his cell to explode like a nuclear bomb and blow up the Time Masters, but I knew Ray well enough to know he wouldn’t be okay with that. I figured if the professor was going to die anyway, he could take a few of our enemies with him.

I was seeing through a glass darkly when the goons brought Rip back to his cell a broken man.

“What did they do to you?” Ray wanted to know.

“They showed me the truth,” Rip told him. “Druce showed me something called the Oculus. They’ve been controlling us all. Nothing we’ve done so far has been of our own accord,” he swallowed thickly, “we’ve been following a script laid out by the Time Masters.”

“No,” Ray shook his head. “That’s not possible. I…I refuse to believe that.”

“Well, you should, Raymond.” Rip squared his shoulders and looked Ray in the eyes. “They showed me your death. I’m sorry.”

I rolled my eyes at the implications of what he was saying. “So you’re telling me the Time Masters have a thing that gives them the ability to control everyone in every place at every point in history?” I snorted. “I call shenanigans.”

Rip exhaled sharply. “Mrs. Snart, you didn’t see what I saw,” he said, “you don’t know—”

“I know the Time Masters lied to you about everything you’ve told us,” I retorted. “Time doesn’t want to happen, it’s just the Time Masters being manipulative fucktrucks. Martin smoked pot with himself as a grad student. Sara met herself as a freshman in college and retroactively taught herself to hit with a flat palm when slapping a dude for being creepy. Lisa kidnapped her two-year-old self. Mick talked to his teenage self about their daddy issues and self-hate. Jax held himself as a baby. There were no paradoxes, so they probably told you that you couldn’t go back to events in which you participated so you wouldn’t try to change the past, especially if they engineered those events. How do you know they’re not lying to you about this, too?” I stopped to inhale gulps of stale recycled air before I added: “It also makes no sense for them to issue Omega Protocols on the team if we’ve been doing what they want the whole time.”

“Unless we aren’t part of their plan anymore,” Ray pointed out. “Then killing us would make perfect sense.”

“Yeah,” I capitulated, “but erasing us from history would undo everything they wanted us to do. Which doesn’t make any sense. At all.”

Rip, of course, ignored me. After all, that was his jam.

I wondered if the Time Masters had been manipulating me since I returned to Earth-1, if they’d engineered my relationship with Len to manipulate us, if they’d let Eobard destroy Rose so I could become the person I was. What if I wasn’t the butterfly effect, something they never saw coming? What if I was just another pawn in the longest game?

I doubted myself, but I doubted the Time Masters were hypervigilant enough to manipulate everyone in everything they did. Trillions of people had lived and died on Earth-1, never mind other parallel universes. There was no way they’d made every choice for every one of those people. All this meant was that my hypothesis about the timeline was wrong. It wasn’t a bunch of microverses and alternate timelines that existed simultaneously. It was a tesseract, a hypercube with every side reflecting possibilities as the past and future perspicaciously fluctuated into the present.

Anyhow.

“I can’t just stand around here and wait to die,” said Ray.

Martin slumped into the corner of his cell so the wall was holding him upright. “Well, if it’s any consolation, you’re not alone,” the professor told him.

“Oh,” Ray flailed one hand at him halfheartedly in a nonverbal _come on_ , “you’re giving up too?”

“Well, let’s just review our situation, shall we, Raymond?” Martin retorted. “They’re turning Mr. Rory back into Chronos, I…” he faltered, “I’m about to have a nuclear meltdown…”

“…and our captain thinks our future is already written for us,” Ray huffed and put his hands on his hips, “you know what I think? I think you’re both a couple of quitters.”

“There’s no escape from either these cells or from the future,” Rip told him with a note of exhaustion in his voice. Whatever he’d seen had taken all of the fight out of him.

“Face the facts, Raymond!” Martin splayed his arms wide open and gesticulated before he fisted his hands at his sides. “We’re completely out of allies.”

Ray glanced down at me. “You’re forgetting the Snarts and Sara,” he reminded the professor, “as long as they’re on the loose, we still have a chance.”

That’s when Druce walked into the cell block, wearing a set of flowing grey robes and a spectacular bitchface. I had to cover my mouth to muffle a giggle that escaped when I noticed he looked like Agent Wonder Bread from the first two seasons of _Weeds_. Maybe he was descended from the actor, but that was neither here nor there.

“Your friends have time jumped away,” Druce informed us. “We’ve lost them.”

“What a shocking turn of events,” I deadpanned.

“And I’ve lost any reason to keep you alive,” Druce added.

I snorted. “You’re full of shit,” I said.

Druce looked oddly taken aback. Apparently he didn’t know how to respond to that, so I kept talking.

“‘For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then shall we see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know fully even as I have fully been known,’” I quoted.17 “I read the bible when I was twelve, after a Sunday school teacher told me that I was going to Hell for being a godless heathen. I like to make informed arguments, so I went straight to the source material to see whether or not she was right. I learned that one of the cool things about God with a capital G is that God is all about free will. I’m not saying I believe in God, because I don’t, but I do believe in choices. If you’re as powerful as you seem to think you are, and you wanted us dead, then we’d be dead. There was no reason to let us get this far, no reason to keep us alive, but here we are. So either you’re not as powerful as you think, or you’re not actually going to kill us…” I muffled a yawn in one palm, “…or you actually think Savage unleashing the Armageddon virus and starting World War III isn’t the reason all human life is extinguished when the Thanagarians attack in 2175.” Yeah, I still had my earpiece in. I’d overheard the cautionary tale he’d told Rip in his attempts to justify the darkest timeline. I still thought he was full of shit. “Maybe if you hadn’t let an immortal psychopath decimate the global population, that wouldn’t be a problem.”

“So arrogant,” Druce said, “you think because you’re from another world, you have insights even the Time Masters do not, when all you see is one version of the story.”

“I think you’ve been too busy playing god to acknowledge that you’re still a man,” I retorted, “a flawed, shortsighted piece of shit who thinks he gets to decide what people live and die for. After all,” I scoffed, “everything you’ve done is for our own good, isn’t it?”

“I do what is necessary to preserve the timeline,” Druce said, “to protect the fate of this world.”

“Yeah,” I elongated the short vowel sound into a chasm of sarcasm and fizzled out to yawn again, “like I said. You’re full of shit.”

That’s when one of the Time Goons showed up. “Kill them all,” Druce gave the order and pointed with extra pomposity at Rip, “starting with him.”

“Yes, sir,” said the goon, “but we’ve calculated when the Waverider is headed.”

“Past or future?” Druce wanted to know.

“No,” the goon shook his head, “the present.”

Then, as if on cue, Lisa shot the goon and Len used the cold gun to smack the smugness off Druce’s face.

“Somebody order up a rescue?” Len asked with a smirk that would’ve made my knees give out if I hadn’t been sitting on my ass.

“Mr. Snart,” said Martin, “your timing is impeccable.”

That’s when Chronos made his entrance in full armor. I swallowed thickly. Mick was part of our family. I didn’t want to lose him again.

“Or not,” Ray blurted.

“Okay,” Len said in his calmest, deadliest voice, “put the gun down, Mick.”

Then one of the other Time Masters came to see what was going on. This was, ostensibly, the one who brainwashed Mick. I hated not being able to use my powers. If anyone deserved to get electrocuted, it was that guy.

“Chronos,” he ordered, “fire.”

“Sure thing,” Mick told him in the strange mechanized voice that came with his helmet. Then he shot the Time Master in the shoulder, removed the helmet, and stalked toward the man who brainwashed him. “If I recall,” he said, “I made you a certain promise.”

“No, I beg of you!” the Time Master tried to crawl away. “No!”

“FINISH HIM,” I said in a stage whisper.

Mick stomped on his skull with a sickening _crack_ that ricocheted through the cell block.

“Fatality,” Lisa deadpanned.

(Oh, the irony.)

Mick used the operating system that came with his armor to disable the energy field that formed the walls of our prison cells. I used my cane to get back on my feet and stepped out, careful to avoid tripping on air. Druce hadn’t regained consciousness. Lisa aimed the gold gun at his face and shot him to make sure that he wouldn’t.

“You…” Rip covered his mouth with one hand and choked on a wave of nausea at the sight of grey matter on the floor oozing from the cracked skull of the other Time Master. “You killed him.”

Lisa huffed and rolled her eyes at him over her shoulder. “He was going to kill you,” she said flatly. “He deserved it.”

“I think he was talking to Mick,” I said, “but what you said applies either way.”

Len wrapped an arm around my shoulders and held me flush against his chest. I hugged him back as hard as I could with one arm and stood on tiptoe to kiss his throat. Then we left the cell block and made our way out to where the Waverider was waiting. I flopped into my seat across from the captain’s chair and I might’ve fallen asleep for a little bit. Len took Martin to the med bay where Gideon could monitor him, and contain the fallout of his impending nuclear meltdown. Sara tried to time jump away, but instead the ship got caught in a tractor beam we had to override using the operating system Chronos had built into his robot suit.

“Professor’s in the med bay,” Lisa informed the team as she folded herself into her seat.

“Promises not to blow up while he’s on board,” Len added, “which I thought was considerate.”

“Yeah,” Rip said, “the Professor’s condition is the least of our worries, I’m afraid.”

“Yeah,” Ray huffed, “much to my chagrin, it turns out everything we’ve done, maybe even our whole lives, has been determined by the Time Masters.”

Sara leaned forward in the captain’s chair and cocked her head, birdlike. “What?”

“Apparently there’s this thing called the Oculus,” I told her.

“Which allows them not only to see into the future, but to engineer it,” Rip explained.

Ray stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jeans and slumped his shoulders when he said, “a future where I’m dead, apparently.”

“Why would the Time Masters want you dead?” Lisa wanted to know.

“Have you ever listened to what comes out of his mouth?” Mick deadpanned.

“Now, in my opinion,” Rip flailed one hand vaguely over the tabletop screen, “Dr. Palmer’s death is not part of their plan.”

“No,” Ray told him, “that’s not reassuring.”

That’s when Mick smacked his shoulder. Open palmed, not hard enough to bruise, but sharp enough to sting.

Ray still flinched with his whole body since he hadn’t seen it coming. “Ow!” he whined.

“You saying the Time Masters wanted me to do that?” Mick asked.

“Yeah,” I elongated the short vowel sound awkwardly, “that’s why I said they’re full of shit.”

“What I’m saying,” Rip interjected exasperatedly, “is that they’ve been engineering our lives to move in very specific directions. And we are playing out that script even now.”

Sara unfolded herself from the captain’s chair and came to stand at the head of the table. “So we can go to 2016,” she said, “but that might be what the Time Masters want. Or we can go get Kendra and Carter…”

“Which could also be what they want,” Len snarked back.

“Then we need to do what they don’t want us to do,” I said, “and destroy the Oculus.”

“How do we do that if the Time Bastards are pulling our strings?” Len wanted to know.

I could see that he was freaked out by the possibility of the Time Masters being in control of him this whole time, pun unintended. Maybe that’s why he started to want more than being just a criminal. Maybe that’s why he started believing in love. Maybe that’s why he was with me. There was no way to know for sure, but I knew him well enough to know he doubted what we were to each other. If he’d chosen me because he fell in love…or because it made him easier to manipulate. Had they known I loved him? Had they engineered our marriage? I tugged my bottom lip between my teeth and my heart clenched horribly inside my chest at the possibility.

“Well,” Rip said, “Druce told me that the Oculus’ ability to control our actions doesn’t work in the Vanishing Point, most likely because the Vanishing Point itself exists outside of time.”

“Explains why we were able to escape,” Mick pointed out.

“And why we might actually have a shot at destroying this thing,” Sara postulated.

Lisa reached out to smack the dense particle physicist on his other shoulder. “I’m with Ray.”

“Ow,” Ray muttered under his breath.

“That’s why I can’t use my powers, isn’t it?” I wondered. “I’m a time remnant. Technically I’m not supposed to exist.”

Rip nodded. “It’s protocol to execute time remnants,” he told me solemnly, “the Time Masters don’t tolerate things they cannot control. It’s likely that the Oculus has no effect on you whatsoever.”

That meant I was totally responsible for failing to change everything after I arrived on Earth-1. Awesome.

“If I’m going to be someone’s puppet,” Rip continued, “I’m going to be the one who cuts his own bloody strings.”

Mick grinned. “And I like blowing stuff up,” he said.

“We set out on this mission to stop Savage and save the world,” Ray pointed out, “to become legends and change our fates. That mission hasn’t changed.”

“This is madness,” Len said.

I had to bite the inside of my cheek to stop myself from shouting _THIS IS SPARTA!_ when he splayed one hand on the edge of the table.18

Len held my gaze and put his other hand on my knee. “I like it,” he said in that low, intimate voice before he told me loud and clear, “and I love you. No matter what.”

I squeezed his fingers and told him, “I love you, too.”

“Gideon,” said Rip, “plot a course to the Oculus Wellspring. I think it’s about time we seized our destinies back.”

* * *

Mick went along with Lisa and Ray to the kitchen to find the cupcakes I’d baked the other day. I liked baking on the Waverider, especially since Gideon did all the dishes. I shuffled into our room after Len, propped my cane against the wall, and sat on the bed.

“It’s funny,” Len said, “I’ve always prided myself on being the guy who doesn’t play by the rules, only now I find out I’m the one being played.”

I shrugged. “I still feel responsible for everything I’ve done, or didn’t do,” I told him softly, “whether the Oculus works on me or not.”

Len put his arm around my shoulders and stroked my upper arm with his fingertips to make me shiver. I melted into the sideways line of his body, skimming my fingers over the worn denim of his jeans from the crease of his thigh to his knee.

“I have no regrets,” Len murmured. “This is our life together, for better or for worse. I wouldn’t trade that for anything, wouldn’t trade _you_ for anything. I just want you to know that.”

That’s when I kissed him, electric and explicit. Len tangled his fingers in my hair and kissed me back ferociously, teeth and tongue; possessive and passionate. I wrapped my arms around his neck and squished as close to him as I could get. It still wasn’t close enough.

“Captain,” I heard Gideon say, “we’ve arrived at the Oculus Wellspring on the far side of the Vanishing Point.”

That was the beginning of the end.

* * *

“Based on Captain Hunter’s description,” Martin flailed as Rip told Gideon to open the AFT hatch, “the Oculus is a massive temporal computer, most likely powered by a scaled-down supernova contained at the bottom of the Wellspring. Why aren’t any of you more excited by this?”

Lisa smiled at him, all sharp white teeth and red lips. “We’re excited to blow it up,” she told him.

Rip flailed one hand at Ray. “Dr. Palmer will deactivate the core contained supernova,” he explained, “which should create an anomalistic event.”

Mick side-eyed him for the vague explanation. Len cocked his head in confusion. “What kind of anomalistic event?” he wanted to know.

“I’m guessing a ginormous explosion,” I said.

Mick nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”

Len kept me close to him on the walk to the Wellspring. I had a gun I’d fabricated, a .38 special revolver with plasma bullets, and pockets full of ammo. I learned to shoot when I was a teenager on Earth-33 and Len had taken me out to a shooting range before. Those were the kinds of dates we went on when we weren’t having sex. It was mostly an excuse to press himself up against me from behind and make me blush. I’d surprised him by shooting the target in the heart eight times. That might’ve been what made him fall for me.

Anyhow.

One of the other Time Masters—a man with a rat face wearing the regulation ugly gray robe—and a bunch of Time Goons blocked our path.

“Hello, Rip,” said the Time Master as more goons surrounded us. “Right on schedule.”

“‘It’s a trap,’” I quipped.19

“No,” the Time Master told us. “It’s destiny. I must say you’ve all played your parts well, but as with everything you’ve done, I’m afraid it was all for nothing.”

I made a garbage disposal noise and aimed my revolver at his mouth. “You’re full of shit,” I retorted.

“All your posturing,” Rip yawped. “All your claims about doing what’s best for the timeline, about protecting history, and it all comes down to coldblooded murder.”

“Well,” the Time Master said, “the difference between murder and execution is only a matter of authority. I have it. You don’t.” Then he gave the goons a nod. “Kill them,” he ordered.

That’s when the jump ship arrived to blast our enemies with a cacophony of blue lasers. It was so chaotic that I didn’t bother wasting my bullets. Len crouched and yanked me out of the line of fire in the same motion, his movements smooth as silk. I flailed and flopped onto my knees. Len snorted and I felt his exhale skim the curve of my shoulder as the jump ship landed. Jax emerged from the hatch as the goons scattered and retreated.

“Returning the jump ship to the Waverider,” I heard Gideon say over the radio. “Good luck, Mr. Jackson.”

Jax grinned. “Hope I’m not too late,” he said.

“No,” Martin grinned back. “Jefferson, you’re right on time.”

Jax reached out for his other half and they merged in a burst of orange cosmic energy. I used my cane to get back on my feet. Len rose and took his arm off my shoulders.

“How did you…?” Rip asked Jax.

“What,” Jax grinned wider, “you thought you were the only one who knew a thing or two about time travel?”

“Good work,” Rip told him. “We need to get to the Oculus before reinforcements arrive.”

Ray approached the temporal mainframe, which was located precariously on a platform above a supernova. It was eerie, looking at the glowing blue heart of the Oculus. I knelt at the edge of the Wellspring and reached out to touch the starlight. I saw it all—every possibility, every timeline. I was five-year-old Rose watching my father die. I was fifty-year-old Mackenzie crying because my children were graduating from college. I was twenty-seven-year-old Rose and Eobard was proposing. I was twenty-seven-year-old Mackenzie getting my MLIS degree for real on Earth-33…

…and Len was yanking my hand out of the Wellspring.

I looked from my hand to his face and arched my eyebrows at him. “What?” I asked. “I’m fine, dude. ‘We are made of star stuff.’”20

Ray, meanwhile, had put his hands inside the mainframe. “Take about two minutes to figure out how to self-destruct this thing,” he informed us.

“We’ll buy you some time,” Rip told him, “you lot guard the entrance. Mrs. Snart, Mr. Rory, you’re with me.”

Firestorm, Len, Lisa, and Sara went to guard the entrance to the Wellspring while Ray tinkered with the heart of the Oculus. It took less than two minutes for Mick to get impatient, because reinforcement goons were firing at our team.

Mick clenched his teeth in frustration and drew the heat gun. “Hurry up, haircut.”

“How much longer?” Rip asked Ray.

“Well,” Ray said, “just about to reverse the polarity matrix. Once I do that, I say we have about two minutes before this whole place goes boom.”

I snorted, but managed to stop myself from singing _we’ve only got four minutes to save the world_. 21

“How big of a boom?” Mick wanted to know.

“On a scale from one to ten…” Ray did some calculations in his head and concluded, “…a googolplex.”

Mick glanced at me, a nonverbal _what the hell is he talking about?_

“Carl Sagan estimated that writing out a googolplex in decimal form was impossible because the known universe doesn’t contain enough space for all the zeroes,” I told him.22

“Oh.” Mick grinned without showing his teeth. “Awesome.”

Ray grit his teeth and removed his helmet. Then he peeled his gloves off before he shoved his bare hands inside the mainframe.

“What are you doing?” Rip yawped.

“I can’t work with all this gear on,” Ray said.

Rip shook his head so fast he almost discombobulated himself. “You can’t—”

“Rip,” said Ray, “a programmer needs his hands. I got this,” he gave the captain a crooked smile, “don’t worry.”

“No,” Rip said. “You don’t. This is what I saw. This is what Druce showed me. This is how you die.”

Ray glanced at Rip, then at Mick, before he looked over his shoulder to meet my eyes. “It’s okay,” he said, “all my life I’ve wanted to make a difference and creating a future for you guys without the Time Masters’ influence…that counts.” Then he saw that the goons had made it through the entrance. “That said, I’m in no rush to die,” he quipped, “so keep ’em off me, okay?”

“We got you,” Mick told him.

I kept peeking out from around the corner of the mainframe to shoot the goons. At this point, I was shooting to kill. I probably should’ve felt bad about that, but if I had to choose between myself and them, I was always going to choose me.

That’s when Rip took a hit that almost knocked him off the platform…and it would’ve, if Mick hadn’t grabbed him by the sleeve of his brown coat.

“I’m not doing this ’cause I like you!” Mick shouted over the gunfire.

“Yes,” said Rip, “I know.”

“All right. Almost done,” Ray said. Then something clicked out of place. “Uh-oh,” he muttered.

“Uh-oh?” Rip echoed.

“There seems to be a failsafe to prevent tampering,” Ray told him. “Which probably includes trying to blow this thing up.”

“Oh,” I groaned externally. “Oh no.”

Mick frowned. “English, haircut.”

“I have to maintain contact with the failsafe it order to destroy the Oculus,” Ray explained.

“Not that much English,” Mick snarked back.

Ray tensed with the effort it was taking to hold the failsafe down without the superstrength of his gauntlets. “Get back to the ship,” he said.

“How about no,” I retorted.

“We are not leaving without you,” Rip snapped at him.

“You’ve seen the future,” Ray pointed out. “I’m dead already.”

“You’re right.” Mick grabbed Ray by the shoulder and hauled him back. Then he stuffed his hand inside the heart of the machine.

“Mick, no!” I yelped.

I half-expected him to say _Mick, yes!_ Instead he smiled and told me, “I got this. I want revenge on those bastards.” Then he looked at Ray, who’d tried putting his gauntlets back on so he could get Mick out of the fire and back in the frying pan. “Now get her out of here.”

Rip left while I was glaring at Ray. If he thought he could princess carry me out, he had another think coming.

“Mick,” I said, “please don’t do this. It’s my fault we marooned you. It was my contingency plan to leave you somewhere to cool off. I’m the one who left you there to rot—”

“No,” Mick snarled, “you were protecting our family back in 2016. I sold out my best friend so I could go home. That’s my bad. Tell Mark I’m sorry. Tell Snart he owes me one,” he shot an incoming goon and murmured: “Tell Bea I loved her.”

I was crying now, tears blurring my vision. Mick holstered the heat gun before he switched hands and reached for me. I was sobbing when he tangled his hand in my hair and pulled me closer to kiss my forehead. I whimpered, because it burned.

“Where’s Mac?” I heard Lisa asking Rip over the radio. “Where’s Ray and Mick, for that matter?”

“Mick has elected to stay,” Rip told her solemnly.

“Why?” Len wanted to know.

“Someone needs to be present to destroy the Oculus. Mick has elected himself,” Rip explained. That must’ve galvanized the Snart siblings into coming in after us, because Rip shouted: “no, no, no, no, no, you can’t. There isn’t time—”

Len trusted Lisa and Sara to give him cover fire while he ran up the ramp and onto the platform. Sara grabbed a plasma rifle from a fallen goon; Lisa didn’t need any weapon besides her gold gun.

“Mac!” Len shouted over the gunfire. “Mick!”

“Snart,” Mick shouted back, “get her out of here.”

“Not without you,” I told him.

Len nodded. Ray held up his hands in mock surrender when Mick shot him a baleful look.

Mick exhaled a frustrated noise. “Pretty boy said I gotta hold this stick for the ship to blow,” he told Len, “so I’m holding this stick. Now leave!”

Len clenched his jaw and I knew him well enough to know exactly what he was planning. “Mick,” he said, “please forgive me.”

“For what?” Mick snarled.

That’s when my husband tried to hit Mick upside the head again. Mick dodged the cold gun, but that was enough for my husband to shove his partner aside and stick his hand inside the heart of the Oculus. I knew he had to, because he blamed himself for leaving Mick behind and getting him mixed up with the Time Masters. I knew he was honorable, and this was about settling the score between them…

…but what about _me_? Us? Our life? Our family? Our home? Our future?

“Len,” I sniffled as a fresh deluge of tears clumped my eyelashes and spilled down my cheeks, “please don’t do this. Maybe you could freeze the failsafe switch—”

“That wouldn’t work,” Ray told us. “If you froze the switch, it might reboot the system, but it won’t destroy the Oculus. There’s no other way. I’m sorry, Mac—”

“No!” I yelled. “This isn’t happening. I _can’t_ , I _won’t_ —”

That’s when Len cupped my face and kissed me. I must’ve tasted salty from the tears, but that didn’t stop him from licking into my mouth. Len kissed me fiercely, desperately, all intense focus and heat. I clutched at the fabric of his shirt and kissed him back until I felt him slip something into my pocket. Len broke the kiss to press our foreheads together and exhaled a soft, raw sound when I whimpered and nuzzled his nose with mine.

“Mick,” Len said with slow vehemence, “get Lisa. No matter what happens, I don’t want my sister to die.”

Mick nodded at his last request and went to grab her. I clung to him, ugly crying and begging him to change his mind.

Len turned to Ray, whose eyes had been obscured by his helmet. “Raymond,” he said before he shoved me away, “get her out of here.”

“No!” I screamed when Ray scooped me into his arms.

I kept screaming on the way out of the Wellspring, all the way onto the Waverider. Mick had to knock Lisa out to get her on the ship without her brother, so she was unconscious in her seat. I stopped screaming when Ray strapped me into my seat across from the captain’s chair and I was crying when I heard Len over the radio.

“Mac,” he said as static fizzled along the frequency. “I know you can’t use your powers here, but are you there?”

“Yes,” I whispered. “I’m here.”

Sara reached out to squeeze my shoulder. I dug my fingertips into the back of her hand and held on, maybe too tight. Sara didn’t flinch or take her hand away from me. Instead she held on to me, too.

“I love you more than anything,” Len told me. “Never thought I deserved that kind of love, that kind of life. Never wanted it until I loved you. I don’t care if this was engineered. I just want you to know that my feelings for you are the realest thing that’s ever happened to me. I wish we had more time.”

“No!” I heard one of the Time Masters shriek. “Shut it down!”

I flashed back to the poem I’d quoted at Lisa in Poulsbo so long ago.

_The truth is this: my love for you is the only empire I will ever build. When it falls, as all empires do, my career in empire building will be over._

I swallowed thickly. “I love you,” I told him. I hated him, too, but if these were our last words I wanted to stop there.

I heard the Time Master shriek again. “Shut it down!”

 _I will retreat to an island. I will dabble in the vacation-hut industry. I will skulk about the private libraries and public parks. I will fold the clean clothes. I will wash the dishes_.

“There are no strings on me,” Len said.

Then, static bloomed over the frequency and withered into silence. I muffled a scream in the palm of the hand Sara wasn’t holding.

_I will never again dream of having the whole world._ 23

* * *

I was in shock, pun unintended. I knew it, dimly, like a low watt lightbulb flickering in a cold dark room. Len’s death felt unreal. It was impossible. Unacceptable. It was, to steal the timeless catchphrase of Vizzini, inconceivable.24 This was a comic book adaptation. Nobody who died stayed dead in the comics. Hell, we had a time machine. I could save him. I could…

…I couldn’t. Not without retconning the destruction of the Oculus and giving the Time Masters control over everyone else I loved.

I actually considered going back and forcing Rip to hold the switch instead of Len. This had been his suicide mission all along and unlike my husband, Rip didn’t have anything left to lose. All that stopped me was my theory that, since the Vanishing Point existed at the edge of the timeline, time travel wasn’t possible there.

I might’ve said I was a goddess, but I’d never wanted to play god. I couldn’t save Len because he died for something bigger than us, even if his reasons weren’t totally heroic.

“He traded his life for ours,” Ray said. “He was a hero. Which I’m pretty sure is the last thing he wanted to be remembered as.”

“But that’s what he was,” Sara pointed out.

Lisa scoffed. “I know my brother,” she said, “and I know he’d rather die than let anyone pull his strings. Lenny was being selfish. Like he’s always been.”

Then she unstrapped herself and stomped out of command central. I knew she didn’t want to cry in front of anyone, not even me. I figured I’d bring her a glass of water in a little bit. I wasn’t going to stop her from mourning Len by herself, but I could keep her from getting dehydrated.

Rip was sulking in the cargo bay, Martin and Jax sat at the table in silence, Ray went to his room and took his exosuit off, and Mick had gone to the kitchen where he could be alone. I left command central and kicked my shoes off before I crawled into bed without Len, between sheets that smelled like him. I reached into my pocket and felt the cold metal of his wedding band. Which made me burst into tears all over again.

“Hey,” I heard Ray saying over the radio.

“Get out,” Mick snarled. “I wanna be alone.”

“Gideon has confirmed that the Oculus has been destroyed,” Ray told him. “From here on out, it’s _tabula rasa_.”

I could almost hear the side-eyeing over the radio. “Pretend for a minute that I don’t speak Greek,” Mick deadpanned.

“Latin,” Ray corrected automatically. I could almost hear him wince before he said, “Sorry.” Then he clarified, “From this point forward, our actions are our own. We have free will.”

Mick snorted. “That supposed to make me feel better?” he asked.

“Yes,” Ray answered gently. “It means that Leonard didn’t die for nothing.”

“He planted it on me before it happened,” I heard Mick say.

I couldn’t see what he was talking about, but I knew Len well enough to deduce that he’d given Mick a ring too: the pinkie ring he’d kept after the first job they pulled off together.

Ray swallowed so loudly I heard it over the radio. “I’m sorry, Mick.”

“I killed Declan, Druce is dead, the Time Masters have nothing now that their ship was completely destroyed…” Mick heaved a sigh, “…yet I still feel a need to kill someone for Snart.”

“Savage still has Carter and Kendra,” Ray pointed out.

“He’ll do nicely,” Mick said with slow menace.

* * *

**Scene V**  
Myth and Dream

* * *

Rip landed the Waverider in 2016 and tried to lure the team off of the ship using a holographic projection of himself. I closed the AFT hatch before anybody could go anywhere, zapped the hologram into digitized oblivion, and glared at Rip through the surveillance camera until he came to see me glaring in person.

“Fuck you,” I snapped, “you don’t get to steal my revenge from me because you feel bad about getting my husband killed.”

“This mission isn’t over,” Lisa said.

“Savage has a time ship, courtesy of the Time Masters,” Rip explained, “the timeline is unclear, due to our destruction of the Oculus, meaning…”

“Savage is lost to history,” Martin deduced.

Rip nodded. “Which is why I brought you all home.”

Jax shook his head and said, “mission’s still not over, man.”

“Jax is right,” Ray pointed out. “We’ve lost Savage before. We’ll find him again.”

“Then what?” Rip asked. “We have no way of killing Savage, particularly now that Kendra and Carter are in his possession, assuming that they’re still alive. Which is highly unlikely.”

I was texting Saf while they tried to talk Rip into removing the metaphorical stick from a certain backdoor orifice. I looked up from my phone and exhaled with enough force to flap my lips. Then I shuffled off to the captain’s quarters and smiled when everyone came after me, even Rip. I flopped into an overstuffed armchair with a soft _oof_ sound.

“Okay,” I stretched the _oh_ sound out into an _ooh_ , “here’s what’s going to happen. Rip, you’re going to take the jump ship to the Refuge and put our younger selves back where they belong. Sara, you’re going to fly this thing because I don’t trust him,” I side-eyed Rip, “since my husband is dead because he refused to listen when I told him that Savage was in cahoots with the Time Masters—”

That’s when Jax bumped into a World War II army helmet. It clattered to the floor of the captain’s quarters in a cacophony that was loud enough to make me wince.

Jax held up his hands in mock surrender. “Sorry,” he glanced down at the helmet and frowned, “was this always here?”

“No,” said Rip, “it lives over…” he narrowed his eyes at the helmet and asked, “did you put it there?”

Jax shook his head again. “Nah, man.”

“This is wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff, isn’t it?” I asked.

Rip nodded again and scooped up the helmet. “Chronometric repositioning,” he clarified. “Temporal changes can, on occasion, reverberate through the timeline, physically moving an object from one place to another.”

Then he found the note Kendra had left inside the helmet and passed it to me. I read it and passed the note to Sara, turning it over to show her what her girlfriend had written to her.

“Gideon,” I said, “plot a course for Saint-Lô, France, 1944.”

“Why then?” Martin wanted to know.

Sara smiled, wide and warm and full of hope she didn’t have before. “Because that’s where Kendra is,” she said.

“How is that possible?” Lisa asked.

“Kendra sent us a message through time,” Ray told her. Then he glanced at Martin and grinned crookedly. “Go ahead, say it.”

“Astonishing.”

* * *

Saint-Lô fell to Germany in 1940. It became a strategic crossroads after that and soon the city was occupied by Nazis. After the Invasion of Normandy in 1944, American army corps fought German infantry troops. Our ensuing bombardment destroyed ninety-five percent of the city and killed over a thousand people.

Savage had taken Kendra and Carter to the Battle of Saint-Lô, which was fought in the aftermath of the bombardment. I heard her snarling at him over the radio and stopped cold.

“I brought you some company,” Savage told her, “although he might be a little disoriented after the way he came out of stasis.”

I assumed he meant Carter, whom Savage must’ve put in stasis to heal the gut wound he’d given him. This hypothesis was confirmed I heard Carter say, “I know you.”

“Oh, you remember her.” Savage’s voice was so grossly slick it made my skin crawl. “Well, his mind isn’t fully gone.”

“Mac?” Lisa folded her arms instead of touching me. “What’s wrong?”

I held one finger to my lips in a nonverbal _be quiet_ , and tapped the shell of my ear to explain that I was picking up a frequency.

“Hey!” I heard Kendra shout, “stay away from him!”

“I’m going to kill you,” Carter told Savage.

“Kendra,” I said. “We’re here. We got your message. We’re coming for you, and for Savage.”

“What are you doing?” Kendra asked. I knew she was talking to Savage, not me.

“Your blood is the key to unlocking the Thanagarian technology,” Savage informed her. “Thanagarians are the alien species which gave the three of us our powers. They sent three meteorites containing technology beyond human understanding. When they are activated by your blood, I will be able to erase time itself, and travel us back to 1700 BCE.”

“Oh,” I whispered. I was right when I theorized that the meteoroids were Thanagarian, but they weren’t just rocks from space. Apparently the meteoroids were alien technology capable of an anomalistic event. “Oh no.”

Kendra seconded that emotion, because she shouted: “No!”

“I will begin my immortal life anew, only this time I won’t be content to whisper in the ears of powerful men,” Savage told her, “this time I will be the one with the power. I will be a god.”

Savage was paraphrasing what I’d said to him when he was in the brig. I must’ve gotten under his skin more than I thought when I called him on his incompetence. Whoops.

I didn’t get a chance to explain what I’d overheard before we left the ship and split up, since our rescue plan was twofold. Lisa, Mick, Sara, and Ray went to fight Savage with a side order of German infantry while Firestorm and I searched for anachronisms.

“Gideon has detected a temporal signature consistent with a time ship,” Rip informed us from command central, “if Kendra and Carter are alive, that is where they’re going to be.”

“Yeah,” Jax told him, “I see it.”

Jax blasted the goons who had the misfortune to be guarding the other time ship. I told the hatch to open and we stepped inside to find Kendra and Carter tied to the seats with some kind of metal straps.

“Mac!” Kendra’s whole face lit up with the smile she gave us. “Jax!”

Jax smiled back. “You miss me?” he asked.

I peeled back the metal holding Kendra in her seat fulgurkinetically and side-eyed Carter. I hadn’t liked him when he wasn’t a Neo-Nazi. I didn’t exactly trust this new version of him.

“Is he still nuts?” Jax wanted to know.

“No,” Kendra told us, “he’s okay.”

Instead of flying, Jax decided that we should run away for some reason. I shrugged and levitated so I wouldn’t hurt my ankle. During our escape, one of the Nazi soldiers tried to shoot us. Jax grabbed the barrel of his rifle and transmuted it into a pile of dust before we flew off. Savage had brought Neo-Nazis from the future, and Kendra took a blast that knocked the wind out from beneath her wings.

“Kendra’s down!” Jax yelled over the radio.

“Rip,” Mick shouted, “we’re kind of outnumbered here!”

“Fall back,” Rip said, “staying here to fight the Nazis is exacerbating the damage that we have already done to the timeline.”

“But…” Jax said in protest, “Kendra…”

Rip shut him down. “Ms. Saunders is alive, thankfully, and we will rescue her in due course.”

I wondered whether he noticed that he called the team by our last names when he was trying to distance himself from us. I didn’t have the time to call him on that, though. I retreated into my room after we jumped into hypertime to take a nap. Martin had a theory about how Savage was planning to use Thanagarian meteoroids to reboot history. I shuffled into the captain’s quarters while he was making calculations.

Martin exhaled a quiet, triumphant laugh. “I figured out how Savage plans to erase time,” he said. “I believe he intends to detonate each of these meteoroids in a different time period.”

“How can you destroy the world three times in three different times?” Jax wondered.

“You can’t,” I said, “not without creating a paradox.”

“Which would result in a timequake that would return the Earth to the point of the first chronothermic reaction,” Martin postulated. “Ancient Egypt.”

“Okay,” Jax said. “It’s official. This is the craziest bad guy plan in the history of bad guy plans.”

“I don’t think that sanity is a yardstick by which Vandal Savage can be measured,” Rip pointed out.

“It’s destroying the world and changing the past to right what he thinks went wrong in one fell swoop,” I said. “It’s not crazy, not to Savage. It just has terribad consequences for everyone who isn’t the bad guy.”

“Okay,” Jax said, “so which time periods are we talking here?”

“You said Savage was in possession of one of these meteoroids in 1958. That was a year of a rare alignment with the Earth and Thanagar,” Martin informed him.”

Rip looked at the equations Martin had written out while he spoke. “Evidently he got ahold of a second meteoroid in 1944.”

“Which would be useless to him in a year where Earth and Thanagar weren’t in alignment,” Martin clarified. “Now, if my math is correct, and trust me, it is, the next two years that Earth and Thanagar are in sync are 1975 and 2021.”

“But,” said Jax, “Savage still has to do this in three different time periods.”

“That’s the beauty of immortality, Jefferson,” Martin said, “he can literally be in three places at once.”

I was about to point out how the pattern of the alignment made no sense—because there were seventeen years between 1958 and 1975, but there were forty-six years between 1975 and 2021, which was mathematically ridiculous—when something else occurred to me. “2021 is the year Savage kills us all in the darkest timeline,” I whispered, “we probably die trying to stop him from detonating the meteoroid. If we fail to stop him at that point in particular, then—in the immortal words of C3PO—‘we’re doomed.’”25 Then I side-eyed Rip. “Hey,” I said, “remember when you told me that Savage finding a Thanagarian meteoroid was far-fetched?”

“Yes,” Rip huffed. “You were right, Mrs. Snart. You were right, and I was wrong. That’s what you want to hear, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I retorted, “because it’s your fault Len isn’t here to appreciate my _Star Wars_ references. Which makes me want to crawl into bed and cry until my eyes are so puffy I won’t be able to see that he’s not in bed with me. Only if I start crying right now, I won’t be able to stop, and I can’t fall apart because we still have to save the world thrice over. So being passive-aggressive and petty at you is all I can do,” I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep myself from tearing up when I snarked at him, “sorry not sorry.”

Then an awkward silence permeated the room until Carter broke it by clearing his throat awkwardly as he came to stand with us at the navigation table.

“So if Savage plans on blowing up the world three times, how do we stop him?” Jax asked.

“We don’t,” said Martin. “We kill him.”

“How?” Carter wanted to know.

“We’ve always known that only you or Kendra could kill Savage using items exposed, as you were, to the radiation from the meteoroids,” Martin explained. “Now, the radiation works both ways. It gave Savage his immortality, but…”

Rip leaned over the table, his palms flat against the wood. “It also makes him vulnerable,” he realized.

Martin nodded. “And Savage is about to unleash the radiation from three meteoroids in three different time periods.”

“Triple the exposure,” Jax clarified.

“Yes.” Martin nodded again. “Which should be sufficient to render Savage mortal.”

Jax grinned. “And then all we’ve got to do is kill Savage three times.”

“Indeed,” said Martin. “Gideon can navigate the Waverider, and we can split into teams: one in 1958, one in 1975, and one in 2021.”

Lisa, Ray, and Mick were Team 1958, so they went back to Harmony Falls. Sara, Firestorm, and I were Team 1975, and we ended up back in Tromsø. Rip, Carter, and ostensibly Kendra were Team 2021, where and when Savage had taken her to St. Roch.

I watched Savage and his men take out an arms dealer from behind a crate and spill a vial of blood onto the meteoroid. “I get to kill him,” I said with slow vehemence. “I want to feel his heart stop and know it will never beat again.”

Savage chanted at the meteoroid in hieratic Egyptian until it started to glow, eerie blue light shimmering through the Nth metal. Martin and Jax merged and flew up high enough to blast the goons Savage had brought with him.

Sara emerged from behind the crate. “Glad we’re past the point of worrying about the timeline,” she quipped.

I paramagnetized all of the knives in his coat and tore it apart, slashing with blades I could feel in a sense that wasn’t touch. Sara twirled her staff between her hands and watched me work. I drove the knives in between the intercostal spaces of his ribcage, into the flesh of his belly, the meat of his clavicles, the weak points at his joints for pain I knew intimately.

“I remember when you tortured me,” I told him, “even though you technically haven’t done it yet. I know the transducer was your bright idea. I thought you’d appreciate _língchí_.”

Savage coughed up blood and smiled, his teeth stained a vivid red. “Death by a thousand cuts,” he said. “How…”

I never got to hear whatever he thought of the slow process, because I conducted electricity through all of the blades in his body and stopped his heart in his chest. I was gasping when his body fell into the blood that had splattered all over the pavement. I flopped gracelessly onto my knees and burst into tears. It was over, the mission was done; but my husband wasn’t alive to see the end of Vandal Savage and I had no home to return to now that he was gone.

Jax transmuted the meteoroid while I cried my eyes out, my tears mixing with the water it had become. Then we took the jump ship back to the future.

“Dammit!” I heard Mick shout indignantly after we arrived in 2021. “I wanted to be the one to kill him…again, I mean.”

“Um,” Sara blurted when she noticed the glowing meteoroid, “I don’t think our problems are over yet.”

Jax tried to transmute it and that didn’t work, so Ray tried to blast it with a beam of compressed light. I flailed my hands at everyone until they stepped back and knelt before the meteoroid. I’d absorbed the strange blue energy once before, and I did it again.

I don’t remember how long I sat there siphoning the stellar radiation from the meteoroid, because touching it triggered a synergetic catalysis and I _saw_ everything the Oculus had tried to show me. I saw other timelines, other worlds. I was Rose and I was Mac and for one long stretch of time I contained multitudes. I looked far enough to see Thanagar, and a Thanagarian man could see me. That’s when I blinked and noticed the meteoroid was stardust.

I wobbled as I tried to stand up. Mick caught my elbow and let me lean on him when we boarded the Waverider for the final time.

“I can’t believe it’s over,” Kendra said. Sara had an arm around her waist and Carter was holding her hand. I wondered if they’d discussed the possibility of polyamory while we were talking about paradoxes.

“Well,” Rip lingered on the _l_ sound, “for some of you, yes, but my journey is just beginning.”

“How does that work?” Mick wanted to know. “Savage is three times dead.”

“Well,” Rip said, “the Time Masters are no longer of any concern due to the destruction of the Oculus, and someone needs to be responsible for protecting the timeline. Who better than a former Time Master?”

I made a garbage disposal noise at him. “Ugh,” I groaned eternally, “if I’ve learned anything on this mission, it’s that no one needs to protect the timeline. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. Not even the Time Masters. Not even the Oculus itself,” I tapped my temple, “and I’m saying that as someone who now has approximately five timelines inside my head.” I inhaled sharply when the ship landed in 2016. “Maybe you should cool it,” I told him softly, “and give people a chance to make their own choices. That’s what Len died for, after all.”

Savage had died in 1958 and 1975. Which made the havoc he’d wreaked in 2166 paradoxical. I’d texted Saf to check on Sela and Rose for me, return them to the future if their parents were still alive there, and do another errand for me.

Miranda and Jonas were waiting when we landed. Rip was stunned into silence by what I’d done. All he could do was hug and kiss his wife and cling to their son.

I bit my bottom lip hard enough to draw blood and sent a text to Shawna to come get me, then come back for Lisa. It took seven and a half hours to take the train from Star City to Central City, and I didn’t want to cry like a bitch during the ride.

“Why did you do that for Rip?” Sara asked. “I thought you hated him.”

“I don’t hate him,” I told her. “I think he’s terribad at his job and I don’t want him to reboot the Time Masters alone. That’s all.”

Kendra gave me a feathery hug, wrapping her arms and wings around me. I hugged her back and swallowed thickly when I felt the tears brewing like another storm.

“Thank you, Mrs. Snart.” Rip said. “This means everything. I cannot even begin to tell you what it means to—”

I held up one hand to stop him. “Three weeks,” I said. “That’s how long we’ve known each other in linear time.” I didn’t include those ten months I spent in 1958 because Rip wasn’t there. “I know it feels longer because of everything that’s happened, but we’re not friends, Rip. I was married when I met you. I had a future. I was _happy_ , and now all I want to do is cry. I never want to see you again. I gave you a happy ending so you’d leave me alone. Okay?”

Rip nodded once, slowly and full of regret. “Understood,” he told me stiffly.

Miranda smiled more at her husband than me. “‘O brave new world,’” she said, “‘that has such people in’t.’”26

Then she took Rip’s hand and they boarded the Waverider together. Jonas turned and waved goodbye to the team as the hatch shut behind him and his parents.

“‘Hell is empty,’” I whispered once they’d gone, “‘and all the devils are here.’”27

Lisa heaved a long winded sigh. Ray put a tentative hand on my shoulder and squeezed gently. “‘Our revels now are ended,’” he quoted. “‘These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air.’”28

There was another quote from _The Tempest_ that, in hindsight, was relevant at this moment.

 _What’s past is prologue_. 29

* * *

I dreamed of Eobard that night, of him killing my father in front of me as a warning to keep me quiet. I never spoke again, not until the morning I committed suicide.

No… _Rose_ never spoke again, not until the morning _Rose_ committed suicide. I wasn’t Rose. Not anymore.

With approximately five timelines inside my head, it wasn’t easy to remember which version of me I was supposed to be. Sometimes I was Mac. Sometimes I was a version of Rose who grew up in an asylum after watching my father die. Sometimes I was a version of Rose who loved her fiancée and lost him. Sometimes I was a version of Rose who said yes to Eobard and I died by his hand. Sometimes I had no idea who I was, and waking up with the Reverse-Flash wrapped around me didn’t help.

There was a moment between waking and sleeping when I thought I was in bed with Len, that his death had been a dream. Then I noticed how skinny he was compared to Len, how pale. Wrong arms. Wrong guy. Wrong ring on my finger, and no ring on his.

Eobard made a sleepy noise and smiled, the harsh angles of his face softened by the love in the look he was giving me. “Good morning, Rose,” he said.

* * *

1\. Maritza Blackbird first appeared in _WildC.A.T.s_ Vol.1, No.2 (“Revelations”) September, 1992.

2\. Sam Scudder first appeared in _Flash_ Vol.1, No.105 (“Conqueror from 8 Million BC!”) March, 1959.

3\. Jax was canonically born in 1993 according to what we saw in _Legends of Tomorrow_ 1x12 (“Last Refuge”), which contradicts with his canonical age being 20. There’s actually a lot of discontinuity in that episode w/r/t the ages of these characters, so I’m ignoring it. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

4\. As the show has decided to participate in the age old comic book tradition of not naming minor female characters, I’ve named her after a character from _Oliver Twist_ (1838) by ~~Charlie Dick~~ Charles Dickens. I also chose the location of the orphanage based on where the novel takes place and set the time for the day _Oliver!_ (1960) was adapted into a movie.

5\. They Might Be Giants, “Birdhouse in Your Soul” from _Flood_ (1990).

6\. Scandal Savage first appeared in _Villains United_ Vol.1, No.1 (“And Empires in Their Purpose”) July, 2005.

7\. Kassidy Sage first appeared in _DC Universe Presents_ Vol.1, No.9 (“Savage, Part 1: Daddy’s Little Girl”) July, 2012.

8\. _Mean Girls_ (2004).

9\. _Pacific Rim_ (2013).

10\. _Mortal Kombat_ (1992).

11\. Tacitus, _Histories_ (100 CE-110 CE) IV.xvii.

12\. _Buck Rogers in the 25 th Century_ (1979-1981) is set in 2491.

13\. Corky Baxter first appeared in _Showcase_ Vol.1, No.20 (“Prisoners of 100 Million BC”) June, 1959.

14\. Jeff Smith first appeared in _Showcase_ Vol.1, No.20 (“Prisoners of 100 Million BC”) June, 1959.

15\. W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming” (1919) 3-4, 7-8.

16\. _Flash_ Vol.2, No.225 (“Rogue War: Conclusion”) October, 2005.

17\. 1 Corinthians 13:12.

18\. _300_ (2006).

19\. _Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope_ (1977).

20\. Carl Sagan, _The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective_ (1973).

21\. Madonna feat. Justin Timberlake, “4 Minutes” from _Hard Candy_ (2008).

22\. _Cosmos: A Personal Voyage_ 1x09 (“The Lives of Stars”).

23\. Mindy Nettifee, “This Is the Nonsense of Love” from _Sleepyhead Assassins_ (2006).

24\. _The Princess Bride_ (1987).

25\. _Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope_ (1977).

26\. William Shakespeare, _The Tempest_ (1613) V.i.183-4.

27\. William Shakespeare, _The Tempest_ (1613) I.ii.335-6.

28\. William Shakespeare, _The Tempest_ (1613) IV.i.1879-81.

29\. William Shakespeare, _The Tempest_ (1613) II.i.986.


End file.
